Preamble

The house met at a Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.

London County Council (Money) Bill (Standing Orders not previously inquired into complied with),

Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That in the case of the following Bill, referred on the First Beading thereof, the Standing Orders not previously inquired into, which are applicable thereto, have been complied with, namely,

London County Council (Money) Bill.

Bill to be read a Second time.

Provisional Order Bills (no Standing Orders applicable),

Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That in the case of the following Bill, referred on the First Reading thereof, no Standing Orders are applicable, namely,

Ministry of Health Provisional Order (Stockton-on-Tees) Bill.

Bill to be read a Second time To-morrow.

Private Bills (Petition for additional Provision) (Standing Orders not complied with),

Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Reports from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That in the case of the Petition for additional Provision in the following Bill, originating in the Lords, the Standing Orders have not been complied with, namely:

North-West Kent Joint Water Bill [Lords].

Report referred to the Select Committee on Standing Orders.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRITISH ARMY.

OFFICERS' RATION ALLOWANCE.

Captain MACNAMARA: asked the Secretary of State for War whether it is proposed to raise the officers' ration allowance when on furlough to the same level as the soldiers' rations?

The SECRETARY of STATE for WAR (Mr. Duff Cooper): The matter is under consideration, and no decision has yet been reached.

DUKE OF YORK'S HEADQUARTERS (SITE).

Mr. DAY: asked the Secretary of State for War what decision has been arrived at with regard to the disposal of the site of the Duke of York's headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea?

Mr. COOPER: So far as I am aware, no proposal to dispose of the site in question is under consideration.

Mr. DAY: Is it not a fact that five years ago it was stated by the Minister's predecessor that its disposal was under consideration?

Mr. COOPER: I do not know.

Mr. DAY: Will the Minister look up the matter and see whether that is a fact or not?

Mr. COOPER: I am quite clear that there is no intention of disposing of this site at present.

YEOMANRY ARMOURED-CAR UNITS.

Mr. ORR-EW1NG: asked the Secretary of State for War whether the Yeomanry armoured-car units will be provided with modern armoured cars to take the place of those which have either become obsolete or have been removed from them when they go into training early this summer?

Mr. COOPER: I regret that it will not be possible to provide Yeomanry armoured-car units with the latest type of armoured car for training this summer but it is hoped that most companies will be able to train with their full complement of cars.

Oral Answers to Questions — SCOTLAND.

FISHING INDUSTRY.

Mr. HENDERSON STEWART: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware of the unrest prevalent among Scottish herring fishermen at the present time, due partly to the misunderstanding of, and partly to anxiety about, the future policy of the Herring Industry Board; and if, in order to remove such misunderstanding and anxiety, he will urge the chairman of the Herring Industry Board to make a full statement in public in Scotland regarding the policy of the Board for the immediate future and, in broad terms, over the next two or three years?

The SECRETARY of STATE for SCOTLAND (Sir Godfrey Collins): Representations on the matters mentioned in the first part of the question have been made to me and my right hon. Friend, the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, and we are receiving a deputation from the Herring Industry to-morrow. I understand that the Chairman of the Herring Industry Board has recently published a statement about the present policy of the board and that, while the policy to be followed over a period of years must necessarily depend largely on the course of economic events, it is the intention of the board to take all practicable means of publicly explaining the board's policy.

Mr. STEWART: Is the Minister not aware that the recent statement of the Chairman of the board to which he refers did not in any way relieve the anxiety, or indeed deal with these particular matters, particularly the fear of the fishermen that the main policy of the board is a drastic reduction of the fleet?

Sir G. COLLINS: I have no doubt that the representatives of the herring industry will submit these points to my right hon. Friend and myself to-morrow. I can assure the hon. Member that we shall go closely into the points which he has raised.

Mr. BOOTHBY: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he has considered the resolution passed at the recent meeting of representatives of the herring industry held in Aberdeen; whether he is prepared to receive the proposed deputation; and what further

action His Majesty's Government propose to take to deal with the present plight of the industry?

Sir G. COLLINS: I have received the resolution mentioned in the first part of the question, and ray right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and I have arranged to receive the deputation from the herring industry to-morrow. With regard to the last part of the question, I think it will be preferable not to make any statement until we have heard the case put forward by the deputation.

STATE-ASSISTED HOUSING (DISTRICT VALUERS).

Mr. JOHNSTON: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware that under the 1935 Housing Act all questions of public acquisition of land are now submitted to the district valuers; whether these valuers can in fact cope with the increase in work thus given them; and whether he can say how many purchases have been approved and how many are still under examination in the county of Stirling?

Sir G. COLLINS: Yes, Sir. The Department of Health for Scotland consult the Valuation Office of the Inland Revenue Department in order to ensure that prices or feu-duties proposed to be paid for land for State-assisted housing schemes are reasonable. Steps are being taken to augment the staff of the Valuation Office to enable it to cope promptly with the additional work. Four purchases of land by the County Council of Stirling have been approved since August, 1935. In five out of ten outstanding cases the district valuer's reports have been sent to the local authority; in two cases the district valuer is negotiating for acquisition with the owners; and the remaining three cases are being investigated by the district valuer.

INDUSTRIAL DEVIMOPMENT.

Mr. JOHNSTON: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he can supply any references to authoritative evidence upon the movement southward from Scotland in control and ultimate direction in finance, railways and factories and workshops employing fewer than 25 workpeople; and whether he will invite the Economic Advisory


Committee for Scotland to give him the conclusions it draws from the Ministry of Labour's Report for 1935, wherein it is shown that during the last 12 years employment in the south has increased by 27 per cent. and decreased in the north by 3 per cent?

Sir G. COLLINS: So far as I am aware precise information is not available as to the extent of any movements of the nature referred to in the first part of the question, but there appears to be no reason to suppose, from the general information available in the publications to which I have already referred the right hon. Gentleman, that substantial movements of such a kind are taking place. The Scottish Economic Committee has, with Government assistance, been set up by the Scottish National Development Council because employment in Scotland has not developed to the same extent as in other parts of the country in some of the newer fields of industrial enterprise. The responsibility for initiating such enterprise rests with industry, not with the Government, and I have no doubt that the Committee, in examining the possibilities of promoting fresh enterprises and employment in Scotland, will consider all aspects of the problem, including such matters as those mentioned in the question.

Mr. JOHNSTON: Will the right hon. Gentleman specially draw the attention of the Committee to the information given in the last part of the question?

Sir G. COLLINS: I shall be very happy to do so.

Mr. ERSKINE HILL: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he has considered the question of the formation of local committees, where those do not already exist, to co-operate with the recently created committee advising on industrial matters in Scotland, and the co-operation of the local committees with the larger committee, where the local committees are already in existence, with a view to encouraging local interest in the work of the national committee?

Sir G. COLLINS: Yes, Sir. In my statement to the Scottish Economic Committee I emphasised the importance of steps being taken by them to enlist the co-operation of the business interests in

the various localities and to encourage them and local development committees in their efforts to help themselves.

LOCHS AND RIVERS (FISH STOCKS).

Mr. HARDIE: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what steps, if any, are being taken to increase the number of fish in Scottish lochs and rivers?

Sir G. COLLINS: The improvement of stocks in Scottish lochs and rivers is a matter which rests with the proprietors of the fishings. I understand that numerous efforts have been made to increase the stocks of salmon and trout, but as these have been made by private enterprise, I regret I am unable to give any particulars.

Mr. HARDIE: Is the Secretary of State aware that in many other countries there is not only protection of the populations of rivers and streams but a system of growing proper feeding along the banks has been regulated, and a great increase has taken place, and could not something be done in Scotland to increase this supply of delicious food? Does he not think something could be done to take this out of private hands and keep to Scotland the right to its own produce?

Sir G. COLLINS: I do not think the time has arrived to take the latter step mentioned by my hon. Friend, but I shall certainly take all available steps to assist those who are at present in possession.

Mr. HARDIE: Will not the Secretary of State in the case of fishing take the advice of his chief, who has been a student of fishing, particularly salmon, all his life, and bear in mind what he said in Edinburgh as to what can be done with regard to Scottish lochs and rivers?

Sir G. COLLINS: I shall be glad to take advice from any chief and from any quarter, but I would remind the hon. Member that responsibility for action must rest with the responsible Minister.

Mr. MATHERS: Will the Secretary of State himself try to help in this connection by being more strict, as far as it comes within his power, with regard to pollution and the instituting of prosecutions for the pollution of the rivers?

Sir G. COLLINS: On receiving reports from any officials of the Fishery Board in different parts of Scotland, I shall at


once take steps. I shall direct my mind to the point referred to by the hon. Member.

EDUCATION ACT, 1918 (AUTHORITIES' PAYMENTS).

Mr. JOHNSTON: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what amount of money was transferred last year by the education authorities in Scotland to other education authorities in respect of charges under Section 10 of the Act of 1918; and whether he will give the amounts so paid by each authority?

Sir G. COLLINS: The total payment in the year 1934–35 under Section 10 of the Act of 1918 was £19,688. With the right hon. Gentleman's permission I will circulate the details of the payment in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following are the details:

Payments by education authorities in the year 1934–35 under Section 10 of the Act of 1918 amounted to £19,688. The amounts paid by each authority were:



£


Aberdeen
471


Angus
2,110


Argyll
27


Ayr
284


Banff
287


Berwick
185


Bute
66


Caithness
—


Clackmannan
129


Dumfries
38


Dunbarton
134


East Lothian
250


Fife
251


Inverness
—


Kincardine
136


Kirkcudbright
548


Lanark
3,165


Midlothian
1,226


Moray and Nairn
191


Orkney
—


Peebles
161


Perth and Kinross
437


Renfrew
5,572


Ross and Cromarty
—


Roxburgh
340


Selkirk
8


Stirling
929


Sutherland
—


West Lothian
338


Wigtown
67


Zetland
—


Burghs:



Edinburgh
43


Glasgow
2,295


Aberdeen
—


Dundee
—


Total
£19,688

OATS.

Mr. BOOTHBY: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he can now state the policy of His Majesty's Government with regard to oats?

Sir G. COLLINS: I regret that I am not yet in a position to make any statement. The whole subject is at present being closely investigated by the Departments concerned.

Mr. BOOTHBY: When does my right hon. Friend think he will be in a position to make a statement?

Sir G. COLLINS: I am afraid I cannot add anything to the answer I have already given.

WATER SUPPLY.

Mr. HENDERSON STEWART: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he has considered the resolution passed at the recent annual meeting of the Scottish section of the Institution of Water Engineers, calling for early legislation to place the public supply of water in Scotland on an improved basis and urging that adequate grants be made available in aid of approved schemes in rural areas; and, since this view coincides with that expressed by the County Councils' Association of Scotland in their recent interview with the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, what steps he proposes to take to meet this urgent need?

Sir G. COLLINS: I have received the resolution and am considering it along with the representations made by the Association of County Councils, but I am not yet in a position to make any statement.

Mr. STEWART: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that this matter is of very vital importance in connection with housing, which he has promised to press forward?

Sir G. COLLINS: I am well aware of the close connection between water supply and housing, but I would remind my hon. Friend that the Government found public money for the water supply a year or two ago.

Mr. WESTWOOD: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware, that due to the opposition of the small burghs of Fife, it was made impossible, even to have an inquiry


into the advisability and practicability of pooling Fife's water resources; and will he agree to call again upon the local authorities in Fife with a view to getting this question satisfactorily settled?

Sir G. COLLINS: I am well aware of the differences of opinion which have arisen in the last year or two, between different associations in Fife on this matter. My office has been in touch and will continue to keep in touch with the representatives concerned, with a view to finding a common solution of this urgent problem.

Mr. HENDERSON STEWART: Will the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind that this is not a Fife problem only, but that it affects nearly every rural district in Scotland?

Mr. WESTWOOD: May I have an answer on the point that there was a provisional promise given, as the result of a deputation which met the Secretary of State, that a conference should again be called if there was any change in public opinion in Fife on this matter?

Sir G. COLLINS: As I said, my office has been in touch with the position within the last few weeks. We shall readily call a conference, if it appears to hold out any reasonable hope of success, and I shall consider the point put by my hon. Friends.

MILK (PRICE).

Mr. HARDIE: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether, in view of the interest and anxiety regarding the price of milk in Scotland, he will publish the impartial report of the committee of investigation on the subject?

Sir G. COLLINS: The disputes which have been the subject of inquiry by the committees of investigation on the terms of the contracts for 1935–36 raise questions of general interest in the marketing position of milk in England and Wales and in Scotland respectively, and for the reasons given by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries yesterday I have, in the special circumstances, arranged for the publication at an early date of the report of the committee of investigation for Scotland as an exceptional case.

EDINBURGH CORPORATION (LAND PURCHASE).

Mr. HARDIE: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what was the price paid by the Edinburgh Corporation for the 215 acres of Bound recently acquired from the Muirhouse estate, owned by Mr. Matthew Mather, running parallel with the Granton-Grammond foreshore; what conditions apply in respect of current leases; and what is the present value at which this land is assessed for the purposes of Schedule A of the Income Tax?

Sir G. COLLINS: I am informed that the price paid by the Edinburgh Corporation for the land in question was £48,500. There is a lease in respect of a dwelling house on the grounds at a rent of £250 per annum for 10 years from Whitsunday, 1933, with a break in the tenant's favour at Whitsunday, 1938. The remainder of the land, amounting to 174 acres, is being leased meantime to the former owner on a yearly basis at a rent of £300 per annum. I understand that application has not yet been made to have the land referred to in the question assessed separately for Income Tax purposes.

Mr. HARDIE: Will this land be so assessed; and, if so, will the right hon. Gentleman inform the House when it is done?

Sir G. COLLINS: Any questions on that subject should be addressed to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

OVERCROWDING (SURVEY).

Mr. MAXTON: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many reports as to the state of overcrowding have now been received, what percentage that number is of the total, and what is the percentage of overcrowded houses as revealed by the reports?

Sir G. COLLINS: Reports have been received from 216 local authorities—representing 94.7 per cent. of the total number of local authorities in Scotland. The percentage of overcrowding in surveyed houses as revealed by these reports is 23.5 per cent.

Mr. MAXTON: Does the Minister expect to have the reports completed by the appointed day?

Sir G. COLLINS: I hope to publish a White Paper shortly giving full particulars of all the reports we have received, and that will show the House the steps that have already been taken and are being taken in this matter.

Mr. MAXTON: Is the Minister taking any steps to hurry on those local authorities that have been obviously laggard in this matter?

Sir G. COLLINS: Yes, we are constantly in touch with the situation, and this White Paper will give details of the actual reports which have been received by us from various local authorities.

Oral Answers to Questions — COAL INDUSTRY.

ANTHRACITE COLLIERIES, SOUTH WALES.

Mr. JAM ES GRIFFITHS: asked the Secretary for Mines the number of shots fired in the coal in the anthracite collieries of South Wales in the years 1930 to 1935, inclusive, respectively?

The SECRETARY for MINES (Captain Crookshank): As the reply involves a number of figures I will, with the hon. Member's permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
Following is the reply:
The following table shows the approximate number of shots fired in the anthracite collieries of South Wales for each of the years requested. These figures include shots fired in rippings and in mines which raise bituminous coal as well as anthracite. I regret that the exact information asked for is not available.

Total Number of Shots fired in the Anthracite Collieries of South Wales including shots fired in the rippings.

1930
2,656,000


1931
2,476,000


1932
2,750,000


1933
2,825,000


1934
2,707,000


1935
2,683,000

Mr. GRIFFITHS: asked the Secretary for Mines the amount of coal tonnage raised in the anthracite collieries in South Wales, and the number of persons employed at those collieries, in the years 1930 to 1935, inclusive, respectively?

Captain CROOKSHANK: As the reply involves a statistical table, I will, with the hon. Member's permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following is the reply:

Output of Coal and Average Number of Persons Employed in and about Anthracite Mines in South Wales in the years 1930 to 1935.


Year.
Output of Anthracite.
Average Number of Persons Employed.


1930
5,568,238
24,386


1931
5,043,245
24,531


1932
5,692,756
26,583


1933
6,127,398
29,205


1934
6,133,934
28,916


1935
5,874,394
27,134

COKE (PRICE).

Sir PERCY HURD: asked the Secretary for Mines whether he is aware of the increasing difficulty of obtaining coke for agricultural purposes and the wide margin between the pit-head price and the price charged to the consumer; and whether he can take steps to encourage a remedy?

Captain CROOKSHANK: The position generally in regard to supplies of coke is at present under examination in my Department. I am making inquiries into this particular case of difficulty which my hon. Friend has brought to my notice since putting down his question, and I will communicate with him when they are completed.

Mr. PALING: Is the Minister taking any steps to find a general remedy for this difference in price between the pithead and the consumer?

Captain CROOKSHANK: This question deals with coke, and I have said that that matter is under examination at the present time.

Mr. PALING: With the idea of finding a remedy for the present difference in price?

Captain CROOKSHANK: With all sorts of ideas.

Mr. GEORGE GRIFFITHS: Is it desired by the Secretary for Mines that the money paid in increased price shall actually go to the millers, as all the public in the British Isles thought it would go?

MINES INSPECTIONS.

Mr. TINKER: asked the Secretary for Mines the number of inspections made by His Majesty's inspectors of mines for the year 1935 and what proportion of these were made on the day shift, the afternoon shift, and the night shift?

Captain CROOKSHANK: During 1935, His Majesty's inspectors made 17,855 inspections underground in mines under the Coal Mines Act, 1911. Of these, 15,261 were on the day shift, 1,035 afternoon and 1,559 night.

Mr. TINKER: Does the hon. and gallant Gentleman think that the number of inspections on the night and afternoon shifts is in keeping with the number in the day turns; and is the fault in that respect not due to the fact that there is not an adequate number of inspectors; and will he consider increasing the number with a view to greater efficiency?

Captain CROOKSHANK: The last question put by the hon. Member raises a great many issues.

Mr. TINKER: Well, think it over.

Captain CROOKSHANK: Of course the Royal Commission on Safety in Mines is considering these very points but, on the specific question asked by the hon. Member in the first place, these inspections on the afternoon and night shifts actually show a slightly increased proportion to that which they had, when the hon. Member last asked a similar question.

Mr. GALLACHER: Can the Minister give us the number of workmen's inspections, or would that require a separate question?

Captain CROOKSHANK: It would certainly require a separate question.

Mr. LAWSON: Is any considerable period of notice given to the managers of mines when inspections are about to be made? Do they get notice several days ahead?

Captain CROOKSHANK: I have answered that question previously in this House, and perhaps the hon. Member will refer to what I said on that occasion.

Mr. LAWSON: As this is a rather important point, will the hon. and gallant Gentleman tell us what he did say on that occasion? This is the crux of the whole question.

Captain CROOKSHANK: If I may, with your permission, Mr. Speaker, repeat what I said previously, I answered that notice is not given of inspections except in rare cases in which it is necessary for an inspector to see a particular person. If an inspector wants to see a particular person, he obviously desires to ensure that that person will be there but, generally, inspections are made without notice.

Mr. COCKS: How is it that they know when the inspector is coming?

Captain CROOKSHANK: How does the hon. Member know that they know that the inspector is coming?

EXPORTS (BRISTOL CHANNEL PORTS).

Mr. GEORGE HALL: asked the Secretary for Mines the quantity of coal exported from the Bristol Channel ports, respectively, during the 12 months ended 31st March, 1939, 1931, 1934, 1935, and 1936; and the countries to which the coal was exported?

Captain CROOKSHANK: I will with the hon. Member's permission, circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT figures showing the total exports from the Bristol Channel ports during the years specified, and I will send to him the further details he asks for in a statistical statement which is too long to justify printing it in the OFFICIAL REPORT, and will arrange for a copy to be placed in the Library of the House.

Following are the figures:

Coal shipped abroad, as cargo, from the Bristol Channel Ports.


Year ended 31st March.
Tons.


1930
25,641,519


1931
20,759,959


1934
15,942,898


1935
15,990,915


1936
14,929,369

SWAZILAND.

Mr. DAY: asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs to what extent


the administration of Swaziland has provided funds for advances by way of loans for the tobacco growers, including native growers, in Swaziland; what is the method of consultation with the natives on matters which directly affect their interests; and whether the present system of ascertaining their views has been working satisfactorily?

The SECRETARY of STATE for DOMINION AFFAIRS (Mr. Malcolm MacDonald): Advances to Swaziland tobacco growers (including native growers) are made by the local tobacco co-operative society in respect of the annual crop delivered by them to the society for disposal. Funds for these advances are provided by loans from the administration. One of the directors of the society is appointed by the Resident Commissioner for the purpose, inter alia, of looking after the interests of native growers. I have no reason to suppose that this arrangement has not worked satisfactorily.

Mr. DAY: Has any application been made by the native chief or his council for an increase in the grant to the tobacco growers?

Mr. MacDONALD: I should have to inquire into that.

Mr. DAY: Is any alteration contemplated in the means of communication between the native chief and the administration?

Mr. MacDONALD: I have said that my opinion is that the present method of representing native interests is working satisfactorily.

IRISH FREE STATE.

Sir WILLIAM DAVISON: asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs whether his attention has been called to the regulations for the control of manufactures in the Irish Free State which preclude the employment of English and Scotch workers; whether steps will be taken by His Majesty's Government in Great Britain to see that English and Scotch workers have the same facilities for employment in the Irish Free State as Free State workers have in England and Scotland; and, failing such facilities in the Free State, what

steps will be taken to preclude Free State citizens in England or Scotland obtaining employment at the expense of English and Scotch workers?

Mr. MALCOLM MacDONALD: I am aware that under the Control of Manufactures Act, 1934, the Irish Free State Government have taken power to make regulations ensuring that factories set up in the Irish Free State in accordance with the provisions of that Act shall employ only Irish Free State nationals, but I am not aware that the existence of these regulations necessarily precludes the employment of English and Scottish workers in the Irish Free State or that any hardship has, so far, arisen out of their operation. As regards the last part of the question, it is not the policy of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom to make any discrimination of the kind in question in this country and, as at present advised, I see no sufficient ground for suggesting any change in that position.

Sir W. DAVISON: If no such circumstances have arisen so far, will the right hon. Gentleman's office keep in touch with the situation to see that no such circumstances do arise; and, in any event, will he see that the same treatment is accorded to British workers in the Irish Free State as is accorded to Irish Free State workers in this country?

Captain MACNAMARA: Is it not a fact that Irish Free State citizens are, in our eyes, British citizens; is it not much better that they should be treated as such; and is it not also better to go in for a policy of removing pin-pricks, rather than a policy of aggravating them?

BECHUANALAND.

Mr. CREECH JONES: asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs whether his attention has been drawn to a protest from the Bamangwato tribe in Bechuanaland against the acceptance by His Majesty's Government of a grant of £35,000 from the South African Union for the assistance of the Protectorates for which His Majesty's Government are directly responsible; and whether he will make a statement assuring the Bamangwato people that His Majesty's Government have no intention of transferring the Protectorates to the Union?

Mr. M. MacDONALD: I have seen reports in the Press of a resolution stated to have been passed by the Bamangwato tribe on this subject, and am in communication with the High Commissioner in the matter. As regards the last part of the question, the pledges which His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom have given to the House, and to the inhabitants of the territories, remain unimpaired.

Mr. CREECH JONES: Should it not be regarded as very much better that the Protectorates should not be put under an obligation to the Union, and will the right hon. Gentleman make representations on this matter so that, if the Government of the Union wishes to be helpful to the Protectorates, they should open their markets to the products of the Protectorates?

Mr. MacDONALD: I would point out that the assistance which has been offered by the Government of the Union will enable works to be undertaken, which otherwise could not be undertaken, for the development of the territories in the interests of the natives.

Mr. MAXTON: Does not the right hon. Gentleman regard this as definitely altering the status of Bechuanaland in relation to the Union of South Africa?

Mr. MacDONALD: It does not limit the status in the least. As I have said in my answer, the position with regard to transfer remains exactly as it was.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRADE AND COMMERCE.

TEXTILES.

Mr. LEACH: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether he is aware that the permission given to importers of textile goods to describe as of British origin textiles manufactured abroad and merely finished or dyed and finished in this country penalises British manufacturers and merchants, in that certain countries allow British textiles to enter at lower duties; and will be consider a revision of the regulations governing this matter?

The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. Runciman): The regulations defining the nationality of goods imported into other countries are laid

down by the importing country and not by His Majesty's Government. I am aware that the practice to which the hon. Member refers may operate prejudicially to United Kingdom exports in certain countries where a reserved share of the market has been in some way guaranteed for United Kingdom textiles, but His Majesty's Government are endeavouring, in such cases, to guard against this risk.

Mr. LEACH: Do I understand from the reply that an importer of Italian textiles, which have been brought into this country through Austria or some other country, can, with the right hon. Gentleman's permission, re-export those goods as British commodities? Surely the right hon. Gentleman has some power in regard to that?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The question on the Paper refers to goods as of British origin imported into foreign countries. If the hon. Gentleman wants information with regard to imports into this country, he had better put a question on the Paper.

Mr. LEVY: Does not my right hon. Friend recognise how detrimental it is to the British exporter to allow imports of textile goods in the grey, and then to allow their exports as British manufacture, whereas, as a matter of fact, they have only gone through a dyeing process?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I have already pointed out that in certain cases we are endeavouring to deal with this point.

Mr. LEVY: Will my right hon. Friend alter the regulations in regard to it?

ARGENTINE AND OTTAWA AGREEMENTS.

Mr. BOOTHBY: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether, in view of the necessity of increasing the supply of home-grown beef and of the present unremunerative wholesale price, His Majesty's Government will insist on the revision or denunciation of the present Argentine and Ottawa Agreements?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I would refer my hon. Friend to the answer given on this subject by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture on 4th February. As the House is aware, informal discussions on the subject of meat and, in general, the revision of the Anglo-Argentine Trade Agreement are at present proceeding with the Argentine Government.

Mr. BOOTH BY: Is my right hon. Friend aware of the great interest felt in the House on this question, and can he give an undertaking that the House will be informed of the intention of the Government before we rise for the Summer Recess?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am well aware of the interest taken in these matters not only in the House, but outside. We shall certainly not do anything which is not in conformity with the view of the House.

Mr. THURTLE: Will the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind, in view of the poverty existing in the country, that it is very necessary to keep the price of meat as low as possible?

Mr. LAMBERT: asked the President of the Board of Trade what steps he proposes to take for the termination of the Anglo-Argentine trade agreement in October next if no agreement is made for its revision in the meantime?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I regret that I am not at present in a position to add to the reply which I gave to the hon. Member for South Croydon (Mr. H. G. Williams) and the hon. and gallant Member for Penrith and Cockermouth (Captain Dower), on 21st April.

Mr. LAMBERT: May we have some information as to what will happen if no agreement is arrived at when the Anglo-Argentine Agreement is terminated?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I do not despair of effecting an agreement which will be satisfactory to both sides.

Mr. LAMBERT: Assuming that no agreement is arrived at, what will be the position?

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Will the right hon. Gentleman bear in mind that there are other than agricultural interests involved in this question, and that it is important to the manufacturing interests of this country that special attention should be given to them?

Mr. EVERARD: Is my right hon. Friend aware that it is generally understood among the agricultural interests of the country that the Government are going to take the earliest possible steps to alter this Agreement, which could be altered within a week?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I think that my hon. Friend is under a misapprehension. We cannot arrive at an agreement by simply imposing the view of one side.

BRITISH COMPANIES (DOMINION OPERATIONS).

Lieut.-Commander FLETCHER: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether following upon the communications from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1913, as set forth in Cmd. 7148, steps have been taken to keep the Board of Trade informed upon any misconduct of British subjects or companies registered within the British Empire; whether this obligation includes operations of companies and activities of British subjects in mandated dominion territories; whether his attention has been drawn to the operations of the New Guinea Goldfields Company, whose London office is Adelaide House, King William Street; and whether he proposes to take any action in the matter?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The arrangements outlined in the circular letter from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to which the hon. and gallant Member refers related to the collection of information by consular officers as to the treatment of native labour by British companies and persons in foreign countries. I am unable to trace the receipt in the Board of Trade since 1913 of information on any cases of ill-treatment of native labour by British companies nor am I aware of any action that my Department could have taken under the Companies Acts if such information had been received. With regard to the second part of the question, matters relating to mandated Dominion territories are the concern of the Dominion Government in question. With regard to the remainder of the question, I have no information as to the operations of the company mentioned, which is incorporated in New South Wales.

DENMARK.

Captain STRICKLAND: asked the President of the Board of Trade (1) whether his attention has been drawn to the inconvenience to British manufacturers caused by the short notice of the official quarterly distribution of imported goods given by the Danish authorities, and the delay extending from three to six


weeks into the quarter in issuing supplementary licences; and whether, in any new trade agreement with Denmark, he will endeavour to secure that this hindrance to British trade budgeting is remedied;
(2) whether, as the decrease in the imports of British manufactured goods into Denmark and their replacement by the importation of raw materials and semi-manufactured goods is not in accordance with the terms of the trade agreement with that country, he will, in any new agreement, safeguard the interests of British manufacturers and their employés?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The points raised in both questions will be borne in mind during the forthcoming negotiations.

Captain STRICKLAND: Will my right hon. Friend also bear in mind the fact that the supplementary licences which are granted are often in excess of the original permits given at the beginning of the quarter?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: That is one of the points which we shall emphasise.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Are the textile interests being consulted with regard to the difficulty of getting licences to export goods to Denmark?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: We have been in close touch with the textile and other interests on this subject and are following them up.

YUGOSLAVIA (SANCTIONS, COMPENSATION).

Sir GIFFORD FOX: asked the President of the Board of Trade the names of the countries which have been granted special concessions in regard to their imports into this country owing to the imposition of economic and financial sanctions against Italy; and whether all the concessions given relate to agricultural products?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The answer to the first part of the question is Yugoslavia; as regards the details of the concessions granted to imports from that country I would refer my hon. Friend to the answer given on 10th February to similar questions by the hon. and gallant Members for Newbury (Brigadier-General Clifton Brown) and Tiverton (Lieut.-Colonel Acland-Troyte).

IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY.

Miss WILKINSON: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether the new extensions to iron and steel works on Tees-side have been assisted by the Government; and, if so, whether any similar assistance is to be offered to the proposed steel works at Jarrow?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: No financial assistance has been given by the Government to the iron and steel works referred to in the first part of the question. The second part does not therefore arise.

Mr. GALLACHER: Would the Minister arrange for this iron and steel works to get a large order to provide material for a bridge across the Forth?

Oral Answers to Questions — MERCANTILE MARINE.

PACIFIC TRADE.

Sir P. HURD: asked the President of the Board of Trade what progress has been made in the conversations between the Governments of the United Kingdom and the Dominions on the Pacific shipping situation; and what proposals the British Government has put before the Dominions to meet the menace of foreign subsidies?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The conversations are proceeding, but have not reached a stage at which any statement can be made.

Sir P. HURD: Seeing how vital it is that the British flag should be maintained in the Pacific seas, cannot my right hon. Friend give the House some information as to the scope of these negotiations?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: I am afraid that I cannot at this stage.

SHIPPING STATISTICS.

Mr. RAIKES: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether any alteration in the method of compiling official shipping statistics has been brought into force since 1st January, 1936?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: No alteration has been introduced this year in the method of compiling the existing statistics of shipping movements, but as from 1st January, 1936, the information collected in respect of the overseas trade of this


country has included particulars of the nationality of the vessels conveying the goods, and statistics based on these particulars will be published after the end of the year.

EXAMINATIONS.

Mr. G. A. MORRISON: asked the President of the Board of Trade whether he is aware that candidates for Board of Trade certificates as master and mate and engineer in the Mercantile Marine who are resident in the north-east of Scotland are obliged to incur considerable expense in travelling to Glasgow and maintaining themselves there during the examinations; and whether, in view of the hardship to the candidates, he will now consider restoring the arrangement, discontinued in September, 1932, as an economy measures, whereby an official went to Aberdeen to conduct these examinations?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: If there are any new factors in the problem I will, of course, consider them, but I am not at present aware of any change in conditions which would justify the withdrawal of the decision arrived at in 1932 on grounds of economy and efficiency.

Mr. MORRISON: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that young men preparing for these examinations are often out of employment for the time? They come home from sea to undergo a course of study. Does he not agree that even £5 is a considerable sum for a young man in that position?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: Yes, Sir, and that point has been fully considered by the Department concerned.

Miss HORSBRUGH: Does the right hon. Gentleman realise that the result of the arrangements made in 1932 have been as bad as many of us then told the right hon. Gentleman we feared that they would be?

STEAMSHIP "QUEEN MARY" (INSURANCE).

Mr. DAY: asked the President of the Board of Trade to what extent the Government are responsible for any of the present insurance risk of the new Cunarder, steamship "Queen Mary"; and will he give particulars?

Mr. RUNCIMAN: The amount of the present insurance on this vessel borne by the Board of Trade is £1,780,000, of a total of £4,500,000 and is in respect of risks arising during construction. Arrangements for the insurance of the vessel against marine risks are now being completed.

Mr. DAY: Have the Government taken any portion of the marine risks?

Mr. RUNICMAN: If the hon. Gentleman wants to know what has been done in regard to the marine risks, he had better put a question down.

Mr. DAY: Were all the markets exhausted before the marine risks were effected?

Mr. GARRO-JONES: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that this question asks about the present insurance risks, and that that covers both marine and construction risks?

DECIMAL SYSTEM.

Sir ALFRED BELT: asked the Prime Minister whether he will consider the appointing of a Royal Commission to investigate the co-ordination and simplification of British weights and measures and the possibility of introducing the decimal system both in this direction and in the currency?

The PRIME MINISTER (Mr. Baldwin): I have no evidence of a widespread demand for change on the part of the business community such as would justify the setting-up of an inquiry into the matters referred to by my hon. Friend.

BUDGET.

Lieut. - Colonel Sir CHARLES MacANDREW: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he intends to introduce legislation to enable parents to annul irrevocable trusts already made on behalf of their children, so that legally appointed trustees shall be allowed to return to parents trust funds originally put into trust by the parents on behalf of their children and on which, under the Budget proposals, the parents, instead of the children, will be called upon to pay Income Tax and Surtax?

The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Chamberlain): I may perhaps refer my hon. and gallant Friend to my remarks in the course of the Debate last night, and ask him to await the introduction of the Finance Bill containing the necessary provisions for giving effect to my proposal.

Sir C. MacANDREW: Would not the effect of such a fundamental change be greatly to increase direct taxation and to cause hardships to many persons who in the past have done something irrevocable but nothing dishonourable or illegal, or in any way hidden or concealed from the Revenue authorities?

Mr. TINKER: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer the figures of direct and indirect taxation for 1925 and 1935 and what they will be on the present Budget?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: With the hon. Member's permission I will circulate the figures in the OFFICIAL REPORT. I would, however, remind the hon. Member that, as I said last night, any comparison between the figures before and after the alteration in the fiscal system of the country would be entirely misleading.

Following are the figures:

Direct.
Indirect.



Per cent.
Per cent.


1925
66.02
33.98


1935
59.57
40.43


1936
60.04
39.96


(Budget Estimates)

Mr. LEACH: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he has satisfied himself before making the order to increase the duties on sodium bichromate and potassium bichromate, that the tanning, textile finishing, and colour making industries will not be prejudicially affected?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The committee's report indicates that attention has been given to the point to which the hon. Member refers, and that they are satisfied that the interests of consumers will not be prejudiced.

Mr. LEACH: Has the Chancellor not realised that in the Command Paper describing this matter the commissioners make no reference to having interviewed any consumer and that the only promise that prices will be reasonable has been made by the manufacturers and this has

apparently satisfied the Commissioners? Is that good enough?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I think it is.

Oral Answers to Questions — DEFENCE.

TECHNICAL COSTS SECTION.

Sir ROBERT YOUNG: asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury whether there is for the Admiralty, Air and War Departments a technical costs section for each Department; and whether the technical costs section in each Department is fully equipped with a competent staff to deal with all contingencies that may arise in connection with any rearmament programme deemed necessary in the near future?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Mr. W. S. Morrison): A centralized technical costs section has been found more conducive to efficiency and economy than separate sections in each of the three Defence Departments and provision for this contralised section is now made in Air Estimates. The staff of the section has recently been considerably augmented in order to deal with contingencies which may arise in connection with the re-armament programme and the question of further augmentation is under consideration.

Sir R. YOUNG: Can my hon. Friend state the number of the staff?

Mr. MORRISON: Not without notice.

ARMAMENT SHARES.

Mr. COCKS (for Mr. OLIVER): asked the Attorney-General whether his attention has been drawn to a, firm of stockbrokers who are inviting the investing public to subscribe to an armament and allied pool, and basing the prospects of large profits on the grounds that the National Government were returned in consequence of a pledge that a large armament programme would be immediately entered into; and, in view of the repeated assurances that no excessive profits are to be made out of increased expenditure on armaments, will he take steps to institute proceedings against the firm for misrepresentation?

The ATTORNEY - GENERAL (Sir Donald Somervell): My attention has not been drawn to, this, but if the hon. Member will let me have further particulars, I will consider the matter.

Oral Answers to Questions — UNEMPLOYMENT.

HOSIERY.

Mr. LYONS: asked the Minister of Labour whether he can give the figures of unemployment in the hosiery and underwear trades for the whole country and for the city of Leicester, respectively,

Insured persons in the hosiery industry and the shirts, collars, underclothing, etc., industry recorded as unemployed (a) in Great Britain and (b) at Leicester, at a date in each month since March, 1935.


Date.
Hosiery.
Shirts, Collars, Underclothing, etc.


Aged 16–64.
Aged 14 and 15 years.*
Aged 16–64.
Aged 14 and 15 years.*



Wholly Unemployed.
Temporarily Stopped.
Wholly Unemployed.
Temporarily Stopped.



GREAT BRITAIN.


23rd March, 1936
…
4,680
6,733
354
3,190
1,457
353


24th February, 1936.
…
4,946
6,714
338
3,406
1,711
447


26th January, 1936
…
4,545
8,140
448
3,667
2,843
489


16th December, 1935
…
3,711
5,907
347
3,274
2,579
387


25th November, 1935
3,521
3,917
262
3,426
3,030
390


21st October, 1935
…
3,540
3,328
224
3,452
2,771
385


23rd September, 1935
4,208
4,811
277
3,611
3,587
465


26th August, 1935
…
4,817
6,954
305
3,511
4,722
439


22nd July. 1935
…
5,052
6,484
236
3,011
3,602
357


24th Jane, 1935
…
5,600
7,500
271
2,935
2,429
309


20th May, 1935
…
6,602
10,736
431
2,935
1,778
305


15th April, 1935
…
6,597
11,817
402
2,926
1,433
266


25th March, 1935
…
6,556
12,350
493
3,303
1,726
327


LEICESTER.


23rd March, 1936
…
884
1,771
11
7
2
—


24th February, 1936
…
1,010
1,678
13
6
3
—


26th January, 1936
…
860
2,242
10
3
5
—


16th December, 1935
…
600
2,077
9
6
4
—


25th November, 1935
507
824
11
4
2



21st October, 1935
…
568
430
11
3
—
—


23rd September, 1935
867
948
11
4
—
—


26th August, 1935
…
1,139
1,673
21
4
—
—


22nd July, 1935
…
1,323
1,423
17
3
1
—


24th June, 1935
…
1,382
2,059
8
4
5
—


20th May, 1935
…
1,514
2,889
10
6
5
—


15th April, 1935
…
1,684
2.499
15
6
4
—


25th March, 1935
…
1,568
2,675
19
16
5
—


* Separate statistics of the numbers wholly unemployed and temporarily stopped are not available for persons under the age of 16.

MINERS (MEANS TEST).

Mr. WHITELEY: asked the Minister of Labour whether he can now state the result of his inquiries with respect to the special advance recently granted to the miners being treated as income under the means test?

Mr. E. BROWN: On the general issue I cannot add to the replies to previous

for each of the 12 months ended 25th March, 1936, or latest convenient date?

The MINISTER of LABOUR (Mr. Ernest Brown): As the reply includes a table of figures, I will, if I may, circulate a statement in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Following is the reply:

questions. As the hon. Member is aware, I am always prepared to look into any individual case which may be brought to my notice.

Mr. WHITELEY: Is the right hon. Gentleman not aware that the public readily agreed that the miners ought to have some additional purchasing power to relieve the poverty and distress in


their areas, and is he prepared to put that special side of the matter to the board in order that no hardship shall arise in the homes where this advance has been received?

Mr. BROWN: I saw some hon. Members about this matter and I am awaiting a joint statement from them.

Mr. LAWSON: But would it not be a simple matter to exclude this addition from the calculation? Why all this evasion of a simple matter?

Mr. SHINWELL: When the right hon. Gentleman states that he is always willing to consider any special case, does he mean that is irrespective of the administrative powers of the Unemployment Assistance Board?

Mr. BROWN: Not at all; I mean, of course, within the law.

Mr. SHINWELL: Then are we to understand that the right hon. Gentleman cannot deal with any special case?

Mr. BROWN: I can do what I always do, and that is ask the board to examine it and see whether the case has been handled as it should have been.

Mr. BUCHANAN: Could not the Minister end all this by bringing in regulations which would abolish the means test?

Mr. BROWN: I could not.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR CONFERENCE.

Mr. G. GRIFFITHS: asked the Minister of Labour whether His Majesty's Government have taken any steps to give effect to the recommendations of the Silicosis Conference, held in Johannesburg in August, 1930, as regards preventive measures; and whether His Majesty's Government will propose that steps should be taken at the International Labour Conference to put these recommendations into effect?

Mr. E. BROWN: The prevention of silicosis is a matter for the Home Office and the Mines Department as regards the premises under their respective jurisdictions and questions as to the preventive measures being taken should be addressed to my right hon. Friend the

Home Secretary or to my hon. Friend the Secretary for Mines. I can say, however, that the preventive measures are constantly under review and that the recommendations of the Johannesburg Conference were based on measures applied in this country. The International Labour Organisation, also, with the support of His Majesty's Government, proposes to appoint a committee of experts to collect information and to stimulate action on this subject.

Mr. J. GRIFFITHS: Will the right hon. Gentleman arrange that representatives of the International Labour Office should give evidence to the commission in the coal industry which is now sitting?

Mr. BROWN: The House will know that the agenda for the 1937 conference is already fixed.

Miss RATHBONE: asked the Minister of Labour whether in view of the fact that the approaching International Labour Conference at Geneva next June will deal with the question of hours in the textile industry, which employs a majority of women workers, he will appoint a woman as a member of the Government delegation?

Mr. BROWN: Yes, Sir.

DARTMOOR PRISON (CONVICT'S INJURY).

Mr. GALLACHER: asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he has any information as to the state of health of convict 156, A. H. Jackson, serving a sentence of five years at Dartmoor; and what were the events which caused the injuries from which he has recently been suffering?

The SECRETARY of STATE for the HOME DEPARTMENT (Sir John Simon): On 1st April this prisoner sustained a deep cut on his right forearm from broken glass. The wound required an operation which was successfully performed the same evening, but it is impossible to say at present whether any permanent disability will result. As the circumstances leading to this incident will involve disciplinary charges against the prisoner, it is preferable that I should not make any further statement pending their investigation by the board of visitors.

Mr. GALLACHER: Is the Secretary of State aware that the allegation is made that the glass which cut the arm of the prisoner was in the hands of a warder, and that the warder was responsible for the wounds—

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member has already been told that the matter is being inquired into.

Mr. GALLACHER: Is the Secretary of State aware that this man is in a very dangerous condition and will he make arrangements—

Mr. SPEAKER: We had better not go further into this matter now. It is being inquired into at this moment.

Mr. GALLACHER: But I want to raise a particular point—

MOTOR LICENCE DUTY (ROAD WORK PLANT).

Sir JOSEPH LAMB: asked the Minister of Transport whether, with a view to reducing highway costs, he will take steps to reduce the licence duty at present payable on mechanically propelled plant used for road work?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of TRANSPORT (Captain Austin Hudson): My right hon. Friend has already approached the Chancellor of the Exchequer on this subject. I am happy to inform my hon. Friend that the Chancellor has agreed to the inclusion in the forthcoming Finance Bill of a provision for the exemption from Motor Licence Duty of vehicles constructed solely for the conveyance of plant which is used for no other purpose than the construction or repair of roads.

AIR MAILS (SCANDINAVIA).

Mr. LEWIS: asked the Under-Secretary of State for Air whether any negotiations have taken place between the Air Ministry and any company other than British Airways as to the payment of a subsidy for a service between this country and Scandinavia, in the event of the Air Navigation Bill now before this House being passed into law?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for AIR (Sir Philip Sassoon): The answer is in the negative.

Mr. LEWIS: asked the Under-Secretary of State for Air whether any negotiations have taken place between the Air Ministry and British Airways as to the payment of a subsidy for a service between this country and Scandinavia in the event of the Air Navigation Bill now before this House being passed into law?

Sir P. SASSOON: The arrangements contemplated come within the period and powers of the Air Transport (Subsidy Agreements) Act, 1930.

Mr. LEWIS: asked the Postmaster-General whether any tenders have been invited by public advertisement, or otherwise, for the carriage of air mails to Scandinavia?

The ASSISTANT POSTMASTER-GENERAL (Sir Walter Womersley): No tenders were invited for the carriage of these mails, which are carried under arrangements jointly concluded with the Air Ministry for the provision of a British air service to Scandinavia, after full consideration by the Inter-Departmental Committee on International Air Communications.

Mr. LEWIS: Can the hon. Gentleman say why the contract was given to one company without first ascertaining what other companies could do?

Sir W. WOMERSLEY: I think my hon. Friend will see information on that point in the answer given to the previous question put to the Under-Secretary of State for Air. I can inform him that the contract had to be given to an air mail service which could guarantee prompt and regular deliveries, and that this was the only firm at the moment which could give that guarantee.

Mr. LEWIS: Can the hon. Gentleman say on whose advice that view was taken by the Department?

Sir W. WOMERSLEY: No, Sir, I can not give that information.

TELEPHONE SERVICE.

Mr. LIDDALL: asked the Postmaster-General whether he is aware that a would-be telephone subscriber in High-gate, N.6, has been informed by his Department that seven to ten days' notice


is required before installation of a telephone; and, in view of the fact that the residence is efficiently wired already, will he endeavour to expedite the work?

Sir W. WOMERSLEY: Ninety per cent. of the applications for telephone service in London are met within a week, and, where the premises are already wired, the service can usually be provided in a few hours. I should be glad if my hon. Friend would be so good as to give me particulars of the case he raises, so that I may make inquiries.

DORMANT FUNDS COMMITTEE.

Mr. THORNE: asked Mr. Attorney-General whether he will inform the House when he received the last report from the Dormant Funds Committee; the total amount of the fund to the nearest available date; and for what purpose is the money used?

The ATTORNEY - GENERAL: The Committee on Dormant Funds, presided over by the late Lord Tomlin, issued its report in July, 1932 (Command Paper No. 4152), and is no longer in existence. In answer to the second part of the question, the total amount of the dormant funds, which consist partly of cash and partly of securities, is at present £2,524,179, taking the securities at their nominal value. As regards the last part of the question, funds in the High Court, whether dormant or not, are held in trust by the Acoountant-General of the Supreme Court, to attend the Orders of the Court as provided by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act, 1925, and are used for payments to suitors in accordance with Orders of the Court as and when made.

Mr. THORNE: Can the hon. and learned Gentleman state for what purpose the interest on this money is being used?

The ATTORNEY-GENERAL: If my hon. Friend would read the report of Lord Tomlin's Committee he would find the matter very clearly dealt with. I can tell him, quite shortly, that, under the Supreme Court of Judicature Act, depositors have 2 per cent. on their deposits, and that any balance of interest on the investments goes into the general fund which bears the administrative expenses. So far as suitors themselves are

concerned, the Consolidated Fund is responsible for the payment to them for any moneys to which they are entitled.

ITALY AND ABYSSINIA.

Mr. LECKIE: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, what steps he is taking to protect the rights of Egypt with regard to the head waters of the Blue Nile recently occupied by Italian troops?

The UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Viscount Cranborne): The rights of Egypt, as of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and His Majesty's Government, are fully protected by existing agreements with both Abyssinia and Italy.

Mr. MANDER: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will consider the advisability of informing the French Government that unless it is willing to co-operate effectively in the suppression of Italian aggression in Abyssinia, Great Britain will no longer seek to maintain a collective system which operates only in selected cases, and that she will leave the League of Nations and denounce the Locarno Agreements?

Viscount CRANBORNE: I would refer the hon. Member to the reply which I gave to a similar question asked by him on 8th April, and to the reply given yesterday by my right hon. Friend to a question by the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Mr. Cocks), to which I have nothing to add.

Mr. MANDER: Does the Noble Lord appreciate that the suggestion in the question represents the view of the vast majority of the people of this country?

HON. MEMBERS: No.

Mr. COCKS: In considering this matter will the Noble Lord take into consideration the fact that the Italians have now declared or threatened unrestricted air warfare against the civilian population of Abyssinia, and can we have anything to do with these descendants of the Borgias?

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Will the Noble Lord assure the House that whatever may be the outcome of the present dispute the Government will try to make the League of Nations effective?

GERMANY ("MEIN KAMPF")

Mr. MANDER: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will inquire from the German Government whether "Mein Kampf" remains a reliable expression of its foreign policy?

Viscount CRANBORNE: My right hon. Friend does not consider that any useful purpose would be served by such an inquiry.

Mr. MANDER: In view of the fact that this book contains some very aggressive proposals and is regarded as the Bible of the German people, would it not be desirable to include such matters as this in the forthcoming questionnaire to Berlin?

FOREIGN OFFICE (PRESS FACILITIES).

Mr. MANDER: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he has any statement to make with reference to the resolution passed at the recent conference of the National Union of Journalists at Carlisle and sent to him deploring the recent tendency to introduce what amounts to a censorship by Government Departments of news bearing on foreign affairs?

Viscount CRANBORNE: A copy of a resolution on this subject reached my right hon. Friend yesterday. My right hon. Friend considers that the communication to him of such a resolution is entirely uncalled for, since it is well known, and I take this opportunity of publicly repeating, that journalists visit the Foreign Office daily for information on foreign affairs and that no attempts are made, or have ever been made, to exercise censorship of any kind whatever. Representatives of newspapers discuss questions with my right hon. Friend's Department on the full understanding that they are at liberty to write as they think fit.

Mr. MANDER: Will not the Foreign Secretary make inquiries from the National Union as to what it is they have in mind and complain of?

Viscount CRANBORNE: There is no reason for inquiry.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSING.

SHIREBROOK AND BLACKWELL, DERBYSHIRE.

Mr. HOLLAND: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware that an inquiry into the housing provisions in the village of Shirebrook, Derbyshire, revealed many families residing in overcrowded conditions; and whether he will state how far the Blackwell Rural District Council have moved in the matter of providing additional houses since that inquiry was held?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of HEALTH (Mr. Shakespeare): My right hon. Friend assumes that the inquiry referred to is the inspection which the district council have been required to make under Section 1 of the Housing Act, 1935. A report showing the result of the inspection and the number of new houses required in order to abate overcrowding is due for submission to my right hon. Friend by 1st June, 1936. My right hon. Friend has not yet received the report in question from the local authority for the district to which the hon. Member refers.

PLANNING SCHEME, WEST WITTERING.

Lieut. - Commander FLETCHER: asked the Minister of Health whether he has considered protests submitted to him concerning proposed developments at West Wittering, Sussex; and what action he proposes to take?

Mr. SHAKESPEARE: My right hon. Friend is aware that there is some enxiety about the development proposed at West Wittering, but this is primarily a matter for the West Sussex County Council, who are preparing a planning scheme for the area, and the Chichester Rural District Council, who are the interim development authority, and my right hon. Friend understands that both these authorities have had the proposals for development under consideration. My right hon. Friend's only jurisdiction in such a case arises on a, refusal of planning consent by the interim development authority.

RURAL WATER SUPPLIES ACT, 1934.

Mr. HOLLAND: asked the Minister of Health whether the announcement to the effect that no grant will be forthcoming from his Department after 25th


April of this year to local authorities who have not taken advantage of the Rural Water Supplies Act, 1934, will disqualify any authority from being assisted with any future schemes which may have been delayed owing to other urgent commitments?

Mr. SHAKESPEARE: Yes, Sir. The £1,000,000 grant for the assistance of rural water schemes has now been allocated, the capital cost of the schemes so grant-aided will exceed £6,000,000.

MIGRATION (AUSTRALIA).

Mr. ERSKINE HILL (for Mr. RANKIN): asked the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs whether His Majesty's Government have been in recent communication with the Federal Government of Australia relative to sending out a commission of experts to confer with the Commonwealth and State authorities on the problems of migration; and what is the present position?

Mr. M. MacDONALD: No, Sir; no such suggestion has been made by the Australian authorities.

ANGLO-IRANIAN OIL COMPANY.

Miss RATHBONE: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer to what extent the shares held by His Majesty's Government in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company have increased in value during the past year; and what rate of dividend has been declared by the company upon these shares during the past 12 months and during the preceding 12 months?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The £1 ordinary shares of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were quoted on 29th March, 1935, at 213/32 and on 31st March, 1936, at 417/32. His Majesty's Government owns 7,500,000 of these shares. During the past 12 months the company has declared a dividend of 12½ per cent. for the year 1934 and an interim dividend of 5 per cent. in respect of 1935. In 193–5 a dividend of 7 per cent. was declared for the year 1933.

Mr. J. GRIFFITHS: Cannot some of the money be utilised for pushing forward schemes for extracting oil from our own home-produced coal?

Mr. THURTLE: Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that this is a very excellent illustration for State ownership?

Mr. MANDER: Is not a good deal of this money blood money from the bombing of the Abyssinians?

Mr. MATHERS: Would it not be well for the right hon. Gentleman to urge, through his power as a shareholder in this company, the desirability of increasing the equipment in the shale fields which the company owns?

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.

Mr. ATTLEE: May I ask the Prime Minister whether he has any change to announce in the business for to-morrow?

The PRIME MINISTER: Mr. Speaker informed the House last Thursday that, on the Motion for going into Committee of Supply on the Civil Estimates, he intended to call the Amendment standing in the name of the hon. Member for Yardley (Mr. Salt), which relates to the lighting of highways. I understand that the Opposition have given notice to Mr. Speaker that, when the Amendment has been disposed of they desire, on the main Question, to debate the report a the Broadcasting Committee.

Mr. MAXTON: Could the Prime Minister indicate to me at what hour of the day it is likely to be possible to proceed to a discussion on the Broadcasting Report, and whether that will be the only opportunity that will be afforded to the House of discussing this important matter?

The PRIME MINISTER: That is a question to which it is quite beyond the power of the Leader of the House to give an answer. The Amendment always has to be taken first, but I do not know whether the discussion upon it will be a long one or not; it depends entirely on the House and on Mr. Speaker.

Mr. MAXTON: Then the importance of the latter part of my question becomes still more urgent. If it should be—and none of us can say now—that the Debate on the question of the lighting of highways, in which many Members of the House are keenly interested, runs until a late hour in the evening, is the discussion after that late hour the only


opportunity that this House is going to have of dealing with the report of the Broadcasting Committee?

The PRIME MINISTER: No; I think that the hon. Member is in error there. Supposing that such a thing should happen, that subject could be debated on any appropriate Supply day. It could be debated on the Post Office Vote at any time. There are 17 or 18 Supply days due.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES (SCOTLAND).

Mr. WESTWO 0 D: I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Weights and Measures Acts, 1878 to 1926, by making provision with respect to the sale of coal in Scotland.
The House will be aware that the sale of coal in England is governed by the Weights and Measures Act, 1889, Part II, but that particular part of the Weights and Measures Act does not apply to Scotland. The larger cities in Scotland have local Acts based on the Act of 1889, but the rest of Scotland is governed by the Burgh police (Scotland) Act, 1892, Sections 417 to 430, which are applied to counties by the Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1908. In the main, these sections have been found to be unworkable so far as Scotland is concerned. As an instance of the difficulties we have experienced in Scotland in dealing with the control of the sale of coal, one of the county inspectors of weights and measures observed a lorry laden with bags of coal offered for sale, all of which appeared to be very light. He informed the salesman that he wanted the bags reweighed, but the salesman refused and drove off. No penalty could be enforced for obstruction or refusal to weigh. I submit that in the interests of honest salesmen of coal, and for the protection of buyers of small quantities of coal, this ought not to be allowed.
The chief defect of the provisions of the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act is that no authority is given for an inspector to weigh bags of coal which are exposed for sale or are in course of delivery. Bags of coal may only be weighed at the time of delivery, and under Section 420 of the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act, which

authorises this procedure, there is, unfortunately, no penalty for short weight. Section 425 imposes penalties for fraudulent weighing, but, owing to the obscure wording and the fact that the onus of proving fraud is on the prosecution, it has been found extremely difficult, if not impossible, up to the present time, to obtain a conviction. The chief advantages of the sale of coal provisions in the Weights and Measures Act, 1889, are, first, that the weight of bags of coal can be checked wherever exposed for sale or when in course of delivery; secondly, that there is a penalty for short weight as well as for fraud; and, thirdly—and this is the most important point—power is given to the local authority to make by-laws, subject to the approval of the Board of Trade, regulating the sale of coal either in bags or in carts. Under these by-laws, which, I understand, are in operation in the cities and counties of England, it is competent to say that quantities 2 cwt. or less shall be sold in 2 cwt., one cwt., or half cwt. bags.
In Scotland to-day, in at least two of our cities, they have a method of selling coal in what are known as "metts" and "half-metts." In other words, instead of being sold in 2 cwt., 1 cwt. or, ½ cwt. bags, it may be sold in 1½ cwt. and cwt. bags. That is quite legal and quite in order, but if someone from either of these cities goes into the surrounding county, where the method of sale is by 1 cwt. and ½ cwt. bags, it is quite easy to misrepresent to the purchaser the weight of the bag of coal that is being sold, so that people think they are buying a 1 cwt. bag when the bag only contains a cwt. For these reasons I ask that, by the extension of the Weights and Measures Act, 1889, Part II, to Scotland, the same powers should be given in Scotland that are already given under that Act in England. In other words, the Bill which I am asking leave to bring in seeks to apply to Scotland Part II of the Weights and Measures Act, 1839, which deals with the sale of coal. It is supported and desired by the local authorities of Scotland, and I have no reason to suppose that it will be objected to by any Government Department. It is supported by Scottish Members of Parliament irrespective of party, and its effect would be to give to the local authorities in Scotland power to make by-laws to regulate the sale of coal in the


interests of the community, and particularly of the poorer section of the community who buy their coal in small quantities. In doing this, it will also safeguard the honest vendor of coal.

Question put, and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Westwood, Mr. Watson, Mr. Pethick-Lawrence, Mr. Guy, Mr. Thomas Henderson, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Henderson Stewart, and Mr. Erskine Hill.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES (SCOTLAND) BILL,

"to amend the Weights and Measures Acts, 1878 to 1926, by making provision with respect to the sale of coal in Scotland," presented accordingly, and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Tuesday next, and to be printed. [Bill 91.]

STANDING ORDERS.

Resolutions reported from the Select Committee;

1. "That in the case of the London County Council (Housing Site), Petition for leave to deposit a Petition for a Bill, the Standing Orders ought to be dispensed with:—That the parties be permitted to deposit their Petition for a, Bill."
2. "That in the case of the London and North Eastern Railway (General Powers) Bill, Petition for further additional Provision, the Standing Orders ought to be dispensed with:—That the parties be permitted to insert their further additional Provision if the Committee on the Bill think fit."

Resolutions agreed to.

LONDON PASSENGER TRANSPORT BOARD BILL.

Reported, with Amendments; Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

Bill, as amended, to lie upon the Table.

VOLUNTARY HOSPITALS (PAYING PATIENTS) BILL [Lords].

Reported, without Amendment, from Standing Committee B.

Report to lie upon the Table, and to be printed.

Minutes of Proceedings to be printed.

Bill, not amended (in the Standing Committee), to be considered upon Friday, 8th May.

NAVY (SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATE, 1936).

Estimate presented, of the further sum required to be voted for the Navy for the year ending 31st March, 1937 [by Command]; referred to the Committee of Supp]y, and to be printed.

Orders of the Day — WAYS AND MEANS.

[21ST APRIL.]

Resolutions reported:

MISCELLANEOUS AND GENERAL.

ESTATE DUTY IN RESPECT OF PROPERTY ABROAD.

17. "That the exemption from estate duty which exists by virtue of Sub-section (2) of Section two of the Finance Act, 1894, in the case of certain property situate out of Great Britain shall cease so far as it relates to any such property passing on the death of a person dying domiciled in some part of Great Britain."

STAMP DUTY ON CERTAIN STOCK AND SECURI TIES ISSUED BY GOVERNMENTS OF INDIA AND BURMA.

18. "That—

(a) the exemption from stamp duty in respect of Indian Government loans conferred by Section two of the Indian Securities Act, 1860, shall not apply to any stock or marketable securities to which this Resolution applies, but any such stock or securities shall be treated for the purposes of stamp duty as if they were respectively colonial stock and colonial government securities;
(b) this Resolution applies to all stock and marketable securities issued by or on behalf of the Federation of India or the Governor-General of India in Council or the Governor of Burma, except stock or marketable securities issued by the said Governor-General in Council or Governor on behalf of the Secretary of State in Council or issued on behalf of the said Governor-General in Council by the Secretary of State."

TRANSFER TO EXCHEQUER OF SURPLUS DIVIDENDS ON SUPREME COURT FUND SECURITIES.

19. "That so much of the dividends received by the National Debt Commissioners on securities held by them for the purpose of Part VI of the Supreme Court of Judicature (Consolidation) Act, 1925, as in the opinion of the Treasury is not required for paying the sums payable by the Commissioners under that Part of that Act and for providing against depreciation in the value of those securities shall be paid into the Exchequer from time to time as the Treasury may direct."

Seventeenth Resolution read a Second time [27th April].

Order read for resuming Adjourned Debate on Question [27th April], "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Question again proposed.

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: May we have an explanation of this Resolution?

3.51 p.m.

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Mr. W. S. Morrison): The Resolution is to give authority for the introduction of a Clause in the Finance Bill extending the existing charge of Estate Duty from personal property other than leasehold situated abroad when that property passes upon the death of a person domiciled in this country. It deals with a loophole in the existing law by which liability to Estate Duty can be avoided by the transference of assets abroad. Estate Duty was first imposed by the Finance Act, 1894, and the charge of Estate Duty made in Section 1 of that Act was an absolutely general charge on all property, whether real or personal, settled or unsettled. But it was obviously felt at the time that some limitation of the generality of this charging power should be effected in the case of property situated abroad, and for that reason Section 2 (2) of the Act provided, in brief, that property situated abroad should not be chargeable to Estate Duty unless it were at that time chargeable to Succession or Legacy Duty. That makes the test as to whether or not property situated abroad is chargeable to Estate Duty the answer to the question, is it chargeable to Succession or Legacy Duty by the law existing in 1894?
That is the present position of the law in brief, and this leads to certain differences in the treatment of property situated at home and abroad for the purposes of Estate Duty, and the purpose of the Resolution, and the Clause that will follow it, is to equate the position for the purpose of Estate Duty between property situated abroad and at home. The differences that exist at present are as follow: In the first place, if what is called by lawyers a gift inter vivos, that is to say, a free gift of his property by a living man, is made, it is not relieved from Estate Duty unless it is made more than three years before the death of the donor. That is the legal position with regard to property situated at home. With regard to property situated abroad, the position is otherwise. Owing to the operation of the Statute to which I have referred, the time limit does not apply and the gift is not chargeable to Death Duty.

Mr. LOGAN: Will this be retrospective in regard to property, say, in the Channel Islands?

Mr. MORRISON: It is not retrospective. It will only come into force when the House passes the Finance Bill, and it deals with all property that is situated abroad. Of course, the difference that I have explained leads to the position that it is possible for a person who wishes to avoid paying Estate Duty to transform his property into property situated abroad and give it any time before his death and free it from the charge of Estate Duty. That may be done by making a gift of bearer securities or deposits in a foreign bank, or making a gift of securities bought and registered abroad. The object of the Resolution is, in the first place, with regard to that category of case, to make the same three years' limit apply to property situated abroad.
The second case in which there is a difference is the case of a joint investment—property held in two names. When personal property situated in this country is held in two names, the position is that Estate Duty is payable on that portion of the property that passes by survivorship to the other of the joint names, at least in so far as that proportion of it is concerned which is derived from the deceased. With regard to personal property situated abroad held in joint names, no such charge for Estate Duty can be made, and therefore it is possible, by transferring property to a foreign place in joint names, to avoid the charge of Estate Duty on any part of it. The Resolution provides that again the position with regard to property in this country and abroad will be equated, and that the same charge will be leviable upon property held in joint names whether situated abroad or at home.
The third category of case wherein the situation of the property makes a vital difference for the purpose of taxation is the case of settled property. Personal, or moveable property as it is sometimes called, situated abroad and comprised in a settlement is only liable to Estate Duty if it is a British settlement, that is to say, if the forum of administration is Great Britain. If, on the other hand, it is a foreign settlement, if a person vests property in a foreign trustee and

makes the forum of administration a foreign country, there is no charge of Estate Duty upon it. When one contemplates the sort of case that arises in these circumstances, where the settlor is domiciled in this country and where the ultimate beneficiary is domiciled in this country, and where nevertheless the forum of administration is artificially made a foreign country, it is quite clear that the only object to be achieved by such a transaction is avoidance of taxation. Consequently the proposal of the Resolution is to make such property chargeable if two conditions are fulfilled: one, that the settlement was originally made by a person domiciled in this country; and, two, that the deceased on whose death the property passed was also domiciled in this country.
That is the general purpose of the Resolution. It concerns only what is called personal property, excluding leaseholds. The reason why real property is not included in it is that it has been a convention in this country and in foreign countries from time immemorial not to make land situated in one country chargeable to the taxation of another country. That is part of what I might call the comity of nations. Secondly, the proposals are limited to Estate Duty. I commend the Resolution to the House. I believe that the avoidance of taxation by means of transferring property abroad is against the desire of this House, and I believe that if we are given the powers for which we ask it will practically cease.

Sir ASSHETON POWNALL: The Financial Secretary used the words "abroad" and "foreign." In which category do the Channel Islands, the British Dominions and the Isle of Man come?

Mr. MORRISON: The question about the Isle of Man is one of which I require notice. There are complications. With regard to the other categories, they both, for the purpose of lay remarks, come in as "foreign."

Mr. RADFORD: I wish to ask a question about the joint accounts that have been mentioned. If there are two joint holders, on the death of one of them does half of it pass for Estate Duty? Suppose that a husband and wife have deposited


£10,000 in their joint names, does the Inland Revenue regard half of it as passing on the death of one of them?

Mr. MORRISON: The custom is to take such proportion of the joint account as was provided by the deceased as the amount liable to Estate Duty.

Mr. RADFORD: My only wonder is that the law has remained so long in the state in which it is, that people were able to get away more easily by placing funds abroad than would have been the case if they kept those funds in this country.

4.5 p.m.

Mr. SILVERMAN: I wish to echo the last remarks of the hon. Member who has just spoken. I would like also to extend the scope of our wonder. While everyone will welcome the attempt now being made to stop all these very glaring examples of evasion of just responsibility, the Government proposal hardly seems to go far enough. One of the conditions which the Financial Secretary said would apply is that the deceased person should have been domiciled in this country. While the Government were searching for the gaps which existed, gaps through which people who wished to evade their obligations successfully evaded them, is it not amazing that no steps were taken to stop up that loophole of domicile? I am aware of cases in which international complications would be almost insuperable, but there are other cases where the complications would be by no means insuperable. One thinks of the example to which reference has been made. The Channel Islands are not very far away, and the Dominions, I am sure, would place no insuperable difficulties in the way.
We all remember case after case. There is the glaring example of people who have made enormous fortunes in this country out of this country's industry and then, having retired not further away than the Channel Islands, have evaded Estate Duty on their death. In one notorious case an estate of millions of pounds, made under conditions which the country would hardly tolerate to-day, was taken away. The person became domiciled in Jersey and no payment was made at all. That person's widow is now engaged in spending a large part of that fortune not merely

in attacking the Opposition for their lack of patriotism, but in holding up even the Government to ridicule for lack of patriotism, and in regarding the Foreign Secretary as a traitor to his country.

Mr. RADFORD: It should be mentioned that the anonymous lady to whom the hon. Member refers came and saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and made an ex gratia settlement, involving, if I remember rightly, some millions of pounds.

Mr. SILVERMAN: I am grateful to the hon. Member for his most illuminating interruption. We all know that there was a. public outcry at the time, and that arising out of that outcry the lady did come and offer voluntarily to give some small portion of what ought to have been a legal obligation. I ought to have given her full credit for that. No doubt it was not even necessary legally that she should do that much. But I suggest now that in this stopping up of gaps the biggest of them is untouched. We would all like to hear that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Financial Secretary, are to pursue their investigation a little further. We do not want to take anything from people while they are alive, but when they are dead cannot we get some of it back when they are as near as the Channel Islands?
Question, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution," put, and agreed to.
Eighteenth Resolution read a Second time.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

4.10 p.m.

Sir ARTHUR MICHAEL. SAMUEL: Does this proposal arise out of the complete change called for by the recent legislation with regard to India? Does it mean that in certain circumstances India will pay a compounded duty, as does the Dominion of Canada, on its inscribed stock. Paragraph (b) of the Resolution, in line 9, contains the words "except stock or marketable securities." Why is that exception made?

4.11 p.m.

Mr. W. S. MORRISON: As my hon. Friend suspects, this Resolution is to


some extent caused by the recent legislation with regard to India. The position of Indian stocks with regard to liability to Stamp Duty is at the moment an anomalous and unique one. Some of the stocks are exempted altogether from Stamp Duty by ancient Statutes, and others pay the full Stamp Duty. When the recent legislation setting up a new Government in India was passed, it was resolved that the whole of this anomalous position Should be cleared up, and the effect of the Resolution is to put such stocks as may hereafter be issued by the new Government of India in the same position as Colonial stocks under the Colonial Stock Acts. As I have said, whereas some of the Indian stocks are exempted by old Statutes from the Stamp Duty, others pay the full rates. Those full rates are £2 per cent. in the case of bearer bonds and £1 per cent. in the case of transfers, whereas under the Colonial Stock Acts the rate will be a level 5s. per cent. all round. It is a, matter which, apart from technicalities, might have been discussed when the India Bill was going through the House, but inasmuch as it affects the revenue of this country, it is necessary to deal with it in the Finance Bill. That is the reason for the Resolution.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: One more question. If there is a transfer of inscribed stock or other stock of the Indian Government, will there be no transfer stamp duty payable as in the case of the Dominion of Canada? Does this Resolution apply to the securities of the Indian Railways guaranteed by the Indian Government?

Mr. GRAHAM WHITE: I am not sure that I understood the Financial Secretary. I assume that this new arrangement does not affect in any way the existing stocks which are covered by the original Statute?

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: As far as I understood the explanation, there is to be a reduction in some cases and a withdrawal of exemptions from Stamp Duty in others. I would like to know whether on balance the Exchequer is to gain or lose?

Mr. W. S. MORRISON: It should have been made clear that this Resolution

will affect only new stocks to be issued under the new regime. Consequently the position which now exists with regard to old stocks will be unaltered. The new stocks to be issued by the new Government in India will be on all fours with the stocks of the Government of Canada and other Colonial stocks.
Question, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution," put, and agreed to.
Nineteenth Resolution read a Second time.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: May I ask my hon. and learned Friend the Financial Secretary whether this Resolution is introduced in order to regularise the position which was discussed recently by us in the Public Accounts Committee?

4.16 p.m.

Mr. W. S. MORRISON: The origin of this Resolution was really in a Committee, appointed by the Lord Chancellor in the High Court, and was presided over by the late Lord Tomlin. The present Resolution and the Clauses to follow it are in accordance with the recommendation of that Committee. I am not aware to what my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel) referred in regard to the Public Accounts Committee. No doubt they dealt with the same matter, but the position is, that the recommendation of the Committee to which I have referred that any sum which is not required to provide a balance for the ordinary day-to-day working of this fund in the Bank of England should pass into the Exchequer. The reason is that the Consolidated Fund is behind all moneys deposited by suitors in these cases, and, therefore, it is not in the least necessary to preserve or to earmark any particular fund to stand behind it. I am sure that the House will agree that there is no reason for the surpluses lying idle and serving no useful purpose, that the Committee to which I referred was quite right, and that these moneys should pass into the Exchequer.

Question put, and agreed to.

Orders of the Day — FINANCE (POWER TO BORROW FOR CERTAIN FINANCIAL PURPOSES).

Resolution reported:
That the whole or any part of the sums required in the current financial year for the purposes mentioned in paragraph (a) or paragraph (b) of Sub-section (4) of Section twenty-three of the Finance Act, 1928, as amended by any subsequent enactment, may be provided out of money borrowed for the purpose under Section one of the War Loan Act, 1919, instead of out of the permanent annual charge for the National Debt.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: May we have an explanation of this Resolution?

4.18 p.m.

The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER (Mr. Chamberlain): I will readily give an explanation if one is required. I thought that I really explained this point in my Budget speech. I said then that I had fixed the amount of Fixed Debt Charge at the same rate as last year, and that, if the rate of interest should remain at its present low level or thereabouts, I thought that there probably would be a margin sufficient to provide for the necessary statutory Sinking Fund. If, however, rates of interest should go up materially during the year, it is obvious that there would not be such an amount available, and I thought it therefore desirable that I should be given power to borrow for the Sinking Fund.

Mr. MABANE: What is the amount of the Sinking Fund at the present time?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The amount is £10,193,000.

Question put, and agreed to.

Orders of the Day — FINANCE (ROAD FUND).

Resolution reported:
That—

(a) the sum of five million two hundred and fifty thousand pounds shall be transferred to the Exchequer from the Road Fund;
(b) as from the date on which, by virtue of any Act of the present Session relating to finance, the liability to issue

sums out of the Consolidated Fund to the Road Fund ceases—

(i) there shall be paid into the Road Fund from time to time out of moneys provided by Parliament such sums as the Minister of Transport may, with the consent of the Treasury, determine to be required for the purpose of making advances to or in conjunction with highway authorities and for other purposes of that fund; and
(ii) such expenses and other sums payable out of the Road Fund as may be specified in the said Act shall, instead of being so payable, be paid out of moneys provided by Parliament."




Resolution read a Second time.

4.20 p.m.

Mr. E. J. WILLIAMS: I beg to move, in line 2, to leave out "five," and to insert "one."
I am sure that the attention of the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been drawn to the very scathing comments which have been published to-day in the "Times" and also in other papers, and particularly to the report of the forty-ninth annual meeting of the Roads Improvement Association held yesterday in which the chairman had much to say about the raiding of the Road Fund. Whatever I might have contemplated saying was said more strongly and perhaps more cogently by the chairman at that meeting. This is an extract from a report of the meeting:
The forty-ninth annual general meeting of the Roads Improvement Association was held yesterday at the Royal Automobile Club. Referring to the Budget proposals, Sir Arthur Stanley, the chairman, said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer's raid on the Road Fund of £5,250,000 was serious, and had destroyed his optimism in the future improvement of roads. At a time when new vehicles were coming on to the roads at the rate of over 500 a day, road users had to continue to suffer from inadequate roads and increased restrictions.
I do not know whether my hon. Friends on this side of the House will agree with me, but personally I never agree to the setting up of funds outside the control of Parliament. This was really a very special fund set up for a specific purpose. The motorists and road users of this country have a case when they say that the tax which was imposed upon them from which revenue was drawn should be used for the specific purpose of making better roads in this country. There is another feature of this case which I


should like to stress. The money that was drawn into this fund was to be used for the purpose of doing something really of national importance, such as the making of great arterial roads for the construction of which local ratepayers would not be obliged to pay. The raid upon this fund and the fund falling into the hands of the Treasury in this way will mean that in the future, even in accordance with the statement of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget speech about the five-year programme, the local authorities of this country will be obliged to face large expenditure on any improvements.
If the original intention for which the fund was established were continued, it would mean that the local rates would not have to bear that portion of the burden at all. The £5,250,000 which the Chancellor of the Exchequer has taken from the Road Fund ought not to have been in the fund; there ought to have been no surplus at all when it is so necessary to spend money in order to save human life now being destroyed upon the roads, and particularly when we find, not only the classified but the unclassified roads in such a state. A very strong statement has been made and published in the Press. I hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will appreciate the weight behind the statement, which is contained in a letter in the "Times" of to-day written by Mr. W. Rees Jeffreys, of the Roads Improvement Association. He says:
The original intentions of Parliament have been brought to naught by successive Chancellors. Parliament contemplated that as motor traffic grew new roads of modern design should be built and maintained entirely at the cost of these trust funds, so that national rather than local needs should receive full consideration and the burden of the cost and upkeep of such new roads borne by motor traffic and not by local ratepayers.
I will read on, because it is a significant letter:
Not a single new arterial road has been built under Clause 8 (1) (b) of the original Act in 25 years.
This is the prime cause of road accidents and traffic delays. Thousands of lives and millions of pounds are lost annually because political exigencies have secured the diversion of funds raised on trust for the service of the roads.

Parliament may agree with the Chancellor that the need for armaments is greater than the need for making roads safe and adequate. The £5,250,000 of these trust funds which the Chancellor has now taken could have built many 100 miles of protected footpaths in the absence of which children have to play and to travel to school on the carriageway of important roads with no protection from the traffic which Parliament has legalised. Parliament taxes that traffic according to its weight and speed. The Government, having taken the money, fails to provide the road space for which that traffic has paid and cynically prosecutes those who make use of the normal speed and capacity of the vehicles for which they paid taxes.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer will have to meet a charge of that kind. If hundreds of children are being killed because the money in the fund has not been spent in providing proper footpaths, and if millions of pounds have been lost on traffic congestion, surely, the Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to reflect again upon this matter. I realise that it is possible, particularly when the Ministry of Transport accounts come up for Supply, for Members of Parliament to press their claims for this, that or the other, but this fund will have been exhausted, and it will be very much more difficult in the future to obtain anything from the Treasury for any improvement that may be required than it was in the past while there was a surplus available in the fund for a specific purpose. In any case, that is the view held by motorists and by associations in this country. Although I am aware that this is just a precedent, anything upon which the Chancellor of the Exchequer may be able to place his hands in the future will be used for the purposes of financing his Defence Forces. While we may be concentrating upon Defence, that is, dangers coming from afar, comparatively near to us persons are losing their lives because of the need of protection in regard to things at home, such as good roads, in order to meet the needs of the speedier type of transport that is being produced.
In moving the Amendment it is impossible for anyone under the Rules of the House to go the whole hog. I should like to go the whole hog, because the Road Fund is a special fund for a special purpose, and it ought to be spent in that special way. In future it will be much more difficult for us to get the amount of money that is necessary to construct


new roads, which is the key of the problem of safety to-day. Safety on the roads calls for the construction of new roads, new carriage ways, new pathways and things of that kind. That is how I visualise it as a motorist who has been motoring 15,000, 16,000 and 17,000 miles a year for many years. It is practically impossible with the ever-increasing rate at which new vehicles are coming upon the road, heavier and speedier vehicles, to save human life except by the expenditure of large sums of money in the construction of new roads.
I heard what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in his Budget speech, and I should like to be assured that the five-year programme announced by him will go forward. I trust that anything that he can do to accelerate that progress he will do. I move the Amendment as a protest against the Government taking moneys that were to be used for a specific purpose, moneys that were put in trust for a specific purpose and reallocating it for a different purpose, when Parliament has not had a proper opportunity of discussing it.

4.32 p.m.

Mr. G. STRAUSS: I beg to second the Amendment briefly, because I and many other hon. Members will have an opportunity of speaking on the subject when ii comes up on the Finance Bill. I should, however, like to draw attention to the contrast between this action of the Government in raiding the Road Fund of £5,250,000, and the promises they made at, the General Election as to the great expenditure they were going to make in respect of the roads during the years they hoped to govern the country. One of their first acts is to deprive the Road Fund of £5,250,000 and thereby to lessen the spending power of the Government to that extent. If the roads of the country were perfect, if they were adequate for the traffic that desires to go over them, if they were safe, I should have no quarrel at all with the Chancellor of the Exchequer in appropriating this money for other purposes. But that is not the case. If we look at the country or the towns we find the roads very badly need improvement. We need new roads and by-passes on dangerous roads, and until we have these we shall not substantially diminish the number of accidents that take place on the roads.
I am very much surprised that the Minister of Transport is not on the Treasury Bench to-day to answer the charge, which is really a charge against him rather than against the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We maintain that this £5,250,000 ought never to have been a surplus in the Road Fund if the Minister of Transport had carried out his duties properly during the past year. Moreover, the raid last year on the fund should never have taken place. This £5,250,000 is the measure of the Minister of Transport's failure to be an effective Minister of Transport during the past year so far as the roads are concerned. What is the position in regard to the roads? Anyone with any experience of travelling on the roads will know that in the country districts there are main roads which are quite inadequate for carrying the through traffic that desires to pass over them, and that there are many roads passing through towns and villages which are death-traps to the people living in the neighbourhood, and which ought to be by-passed. Why do these inadequate roads exist and why have not the other roads been by-passed? Simply because the Minister of Transport's policy in regard to payments out of the Road Fund has not been sufficiently generous to encourage local authorities to carry out the work.
If the Minister of Transport during the past few years had adopted a more forward policy, a policy in conformity with his speeches, this money that is being raided to-day by the Treasury would have been spent in providing better roads. The local authorities want better roads. They are all crying out for better roads, but in case after case they are unable to spend the money on the roads which is so necessary because it is extremely costly expenditure and very often the local authority is poor, and the Minister of Transport who, finally, is the Treasury, is unwilling to make more than a certain percentage grant towards the cost of roads. Therefore, as the local authorities in many cases cannot afford to pay the balance, the inadequate and dangerous roads continue in their present condition. That is the position in the country. I know something about the position in London as chairman of the highways committee of the London County Council. And the same position exists in the cities. We hear speeches


from the Treasury Bench by the Minister of Transport about the wonderful things he is going to do and the wonderful things he is doing. One would have thought that he is doing all that is possible by adequate subsidies from the Road Fund for the improvement of the roads of the country, but when one comes to discuss with the Minister of Transport what grants are to be given for this road or that, one finds that it is more difficult to get adequate grants out of the present Government and the present Minister of Transport than it has been to get a grant from any other Government or Minister. There is an amazing contrast between the speeches made about the great things that are being done on the roads, and the actual administration, when one comes to examine it.
This money which is being taken by the Treasury ought never to have been available for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to raid. It is the fault of the Minister of Transport and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as custodian of the Treasury, because this money ought to have been spent in making roads safe, in reducing the casualties among men, women and children and in making the roads really suitable for the traffic that has to go over them. It is particularly bad at a moment when the vehicles on the road are increasing to such an extent that between five and six hundred vehicles a day are being registered, that the Government should come along and say, "There is a surplus of money here which should have been spent on the roads but has not been spent, and we are going to take the money for other purposes." I have great pleasure in seconding the Amendment and in asking the House to prevent the Government mismanaging their responsibilities in regard to the roads of the country in this appalling manner.

4.40 p.m.

Mr. MABANE: I should like to say a few words in opposition to the Amendment and in support of the Resolution, because last year I objected to the abstraction of certain moneys from the Road Fund. The Mover and Seconder of the Amendment have apparently read only half the Resolution, paragraph (a) and not paragraph (b). I objected to

the abstraction of certain moneys from the Road Fund last year because it did appear that the money available to be spent on the roads was likely to be conditioned by the amount of money in the Road Fund. This Resolution alters the whole position. It is clear that in future the Minister of Transport will be able to come along with his Estimates and will be able to gather the feeling of the House in a much better way than it has been possible to do in the past.

Mr. E. J. WILLIAMS: Where is the Minister of Transport?

Mr. MABANE: This is a Treasury Resolution, and I presume the Minister of Transport will be on the Treasury Bench when the Resolution is being put to the House. I approve of the Resolution because it is doing two things at the same time. It is removing the balance from the Road Fund and at the same time it is providing that any amount that may be provided in the future will be provided by the Government. It seems to me folly to imagine that there is a necessary connection between the money that goes into the Road Fund and the amount of money that ought to be spent on the roads.

Mr. A. BEVAN: On a point of Order. Is it competent for us to discuss the whole of the Resolution, or must we confine our discussion to the merits of the Amendment? Up to the moment the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Mabane) has been discussing the merits of the Resolution as a whole. While we have no objection to that, we should like to know where we are. So far we have left the other part of the Resolution out of our discussion, because we thought it would be out of order.

Mr. MABANE: On the point of Order. May I point out that the Mover of the Amendment said it was purely a technical and symbolic Amendment and that he merely moved it in this fashion because he was not able to move the deletion of the whole lot. Therefore, as he was discussing the whole issue of the Road Fund I thought that I was entitled to do so.

Mr. BEVAN: The reason why the Amendment is in this form is because it is the only form in which it would be in order. The form which our Amendment would otherwise have taken would have been to leave all the money in the fund.

Mr. SPEAKER: The Amendment and the Resolution seem to be so interwoven that it is rather difficult to separate them. When the Amendment has been disposed of, we shall have to put the Question; "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Mr. MABANE: I take it from your Ruling, Mr. Speaker, that I was not exceeding the limits of propriety. I was dealing as closely as I could with the specific point raised by the Mover and Seconder of the Amendment. It appears to me that the Seconder of the Amendment was wrong in suggesting that the Minister of Transport is in any way criticised by the Resolution, or that his powers are in any way diminished. The powers of the Minister of Transport are likely to be increased, because there is no reason in the future why he should consider that the amount coming into the Road Fund is of necessity the limit of his expenditure. He can come to the House and submit his Estimates, and hon. Members will be able to express their views about the development of the roads in a way that they have not been able to do in the past. Many hon. Members on this side of the House would not approve of the Resolution if they felt that it was going to have the effect suggested by the Mover and Seconder of the Amendment. We appreciate as much as they do the fact that the roads need development and that they are not satisfactory. Many hon. Members on this side would not approve the Resolution if they felt that the progress of road development would be diminished by the acceptance of the Resolution.
There is another reason to be considered. It has been the custom in the past to regard money paid into the Road Fund as appropriated revenue. Surely the House dislikes the idea of an appropriated revenue. It was rather unfortunate in the discussion on the Tea Duty yesterday that some hon. Members imagined that it was appropriated revenue to be used for some specific purpose. If all the taxes paid by the people were to be appropriated to this or that particular purpose we should get into a hopeless tangle. I welcome the Resolution because it removes the idea of an appropriated revenue in such a way that the purposes for which the Road

Fund was established will not be forgotten. Indeed, the Minister concerned with the development of our roads will be in a far better Parliamentary position.

4.46 p.m.

Major LLOYD GEORGE: I find it extremely difficult to follow the arguments of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr: Mabane). I take it that one reason why Chancellors of the Exchequer have helped themselves to this fund in the past is the same reason that has led the present Chancellor of the Exchequer also to help himself to the fund. The real reason for the present Chancellor of the Exchequer's attitude is that he wants money. In his Budget speech he said that the reason for this change was not that his attitude towards road problems had altered at all, but that the system of feeding the fund was a failure. The real reason, of course, is that the right hon. Gentleman wanted the money, and this is the easiest way of getting it. The right hon. Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) heartily supported the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He, indeed, set the fashion some years ago.
I could not follow the right hon. Gentleman any more than I can follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield in the suggestion that it is a, monstrous thing to appropriate any particular tax from any section of the taxpayers for a special purpose. That is not the position at all. The Government of the day put a special tax on motorists and the motoring industry, and called it a special tax, in order that this new means of propulsion could be accommodated on the roads. The tax was so devised that as the problem grew, so did the means of solving the problem grow. That is the real position. It is not that any body of motorists have taken up the attitude that they are entitled to the money that has been paid. As a matter of fact, my right hon. Friend the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George), when introducing this tax in 1909, said:
The Exchequer will derive no benefit whatever from it. All the money will go to the roads of this country. Motorists were not only willing but were anxious to pay this special tax, provided they had a guarantee that the moneys so taken by the Exchequer will be used exclusively for the roads of the country.
That was the position. The question of appropriated revenue was decided at that time by the House of Commons, and, indeed, for many years afterwards it has


been admitted as a perfectly fair thing to do. When the original tax was put on there was undoubtedly a feeling amongst motorists that there was a guarantee that the moneys taken by the Exchequer would be devoted entirely to the roads of the country. It was also the case with the Petrol Duty. It may be interesting to the House to know that the right hon. Member for West Birmingham (Sir A. Chamberlain) in the debates asked this question:
Is it intended that the tax upon petrol, like the tax upon cars, should go to the roads or is it intended that it should go into the general Imperial revenue? Our attitude towards the tax will depend upon the answer to that question. If it is going to the support of the roads we think it is a fair proposition, but if it is intended to take it for general revenue then we shall oppose it.
If that applies to the Petrol Duty it applies equally to the tax specially raised for the development of roads. The two things which were unanimously agreed to in that Budget—there were other provisions which were not unanimously accepted—were first, the tax on motors, and, secondly, the tax on petrol, on the assurance that the whole of the money would be devoted to the roads of the country. What has happened since? Millions have been taken out of the Road Fund, and the Petrol Duty in its entirety has gone to the Exchequer. If nothing else required doing to the roads of the country, if they were perfectly efficient, I should not complain so much. The right hon. Member for Epping in his speech said that he had blazed the trail. The right hon. Member does not often use wrong words in his speeches, but if he had used the word "blasted" it would have been more appropriate. But since the right hon. Gentleman blazed the trail, motor licences have gone up by 45 per cent., the number of people killed on the roads by 33 per cent. and the number of people injured by 66 per cent. This is not a matter which concerns motorists alone; it is a question which concerns the people of this country.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his speech said that in view of the unprecedented demands on the Exchequer he was entitled to survey all sources of revenue and direct them where they are most needed. I take it that he was referring to the extra expenditure necessary for the

defences of this country. May I remind him of the casualties on the roads? There are other casualties besides those which occur in war. A study of the casualties on the roads of this country will convince anybody that there is a substantial war going on. In the last 10 years something like 2,000,000 people have been killed or injured on our roads. I doubt very much whether in any war, apart from the Great War, the casualties are comparable with those which have occurred in this country on our roads during the last 10 years. Our people are as much entitled to protection from this particular danger as they are from any enemy. Anyone who uses the roads will realise that they are still absolutely unsuitable for the motor traffic of to-day. Let me give one example which occurred in the last four days. I came along one of the biggest arterial roads in this country, and within a space of 20 miles there were five bridges on which no two cars could possibly pass. It is a physical impossibility for more than one car to cross the bridge at the same time. Two of them are old-fashioned, humpbacked bridges, and you cannot see what is approaching from the other side. They have not been altered since the days of the old stage coach. This is on one of the four main roads of the country, and yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer says that he can afford to take millions from the Road Fund.
The right hon. Gentleman says that he does not propose to curtail the five-year plan. I can assure him that it is already curtailed. There are many local authorities who are quite incapable of playing any part in any big development of our roads. There are authorities whose highway rate is as high as 8s. in the £ in some cases it reaches 9s. in the £. In my own constituency the highway rate is 8s. in the £, and I have a depressed area in which unemployment is 35 per cent. How can you expect such an authority to participate as it ought in road development unless it gets money from national sources? I support the Amendment. The fund should not be utilised for purposes other than those for which it was created until we are satisfied that everything has been done to make our roads efficient. I think the fund should be utilised for this purpose. You should make the roads safer and more efficient and would save thousands of our fellow citizens from


death and injury. Further, there is the not unimportant point that you would in this way give employment to many people at home.

4.56 p.m.

Mr. McCORQUODALE: I should like to congratulate the Chancellor of the Exchequer on taking a step to abolish the Road Fund as a specific fund. I take a little pride in the proposal because I urged the Chancellor of the Exchequer to take this step last year.

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: I think the Debate is now getting a considerable distance beyond the Amendment. The hon. Member is now speaking to the second part of the Resolution.

Mr. McCORQUODALE: I had not finished my first sentence. Perhaps the hon. Member will exercise a little patience. I was going on to say that I think the Amendment has missed the mark and that the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Pembroke (Major Lloyd George) was entirely beside the point. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to take over the liabilities of the Road Fund, if he is going to abolish the Road Fund as a specific fund and pay out of the Treasury all the sums necessary for the construction and development of the roads, he is entitled to take over the reserve which the fund has accumulated. It is only a matter of book-keeping. I suggest that hon. Members opposite, in the Amendment they have moved and in the explanations they have given of it, have rather missed the mark.

4.59 p.m.

Mr. MATHERS: I should like to address the House for a few minutes on the point that is raised by the Amendment. If the Amendment is carried I want to use the money which will be left. I have a road for it, or perhaps, I should say, I have a bridge for it. The fact that there is no representative of the Ministry of Transport on the Treasury Bench at the moment is an indication of the position which we have reached. Let me deal with the second part of the Resolution for a moment. What we see being done by this Resolution is to remove the Minister of Transport from first to second place in the consideration of expenditure which is desired upon roads. He is at the present time meeting representatives of local authorities and others

who are urging the desirability of expenditure upon roads in certain directions. He knows that he has at his disposal a fund of a certain amount, he knows what commitments he has made for the year in respect of that fund, and he knows, therefore, what sort of indication he can make to those who are approaching him as to the prospects of meeting their claims.
But in the changed circumstances proposed by this Resolution, we find that not only has the Minister of Transport to be convinced himself of the rightness of some form of expenditure, but, after that, he has to go—without the power that he has at present of being able to say, "Here is a fund that at least should be under my control and that is allocated by Parliament for the job that I have to do "—he has to go to the Treasury, the hard-hearted Treasury, as it is usually described, and there, at second-hand, to convince the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the case that has been made to him by the people who wish to have expenditure sanctioned in a certain direction. There may be the criticism that that is what he has to do at present, and that in respect especially of major schemes he has to convince the Chancellor and the Treasury of the desirability of certain expenditure, but I think the very atmosphere of putting this fund in a new position—

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER (Captain Bourne): I think the hon. Member would be bore in order in making these remarks when I put the Question, "That the House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: On a point of Order. On being asked whether the Debate on this Amendment would be confined strictly to the Amendment or whether it would be in order to discuss the general question of the Resolution, Mr. Speaker laid it down that the paragraph in the Resolution to which the Amendment referred and the whole of the Resolution were so intertwined that it was not very possible to separate them. If I may say so respectfully, I agree entirely with that view, and I was going to ask whether it would not be for the convenience of the House that we should take rather a wider scope for the Debate on the Amendment and discuss the whole question on this Amendment.

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: On the point of Order. Though Mr. Speaker did say what the right hon. Gentleman has just recalled, he also said that when the Amendment had been disposed of there would be the Resolution to vote upon, and that before that vote was taken there would be an opportunity for discussing the whole proposal of the Resolution. I had hoped that the points were sufficiently distinct for us to have two separate Debates. I agree that the Debate has ranged over a rather wider ground than I had anticipated, and if it is the general wish of the House that the two Debates should be taken together and you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, wish us to proceed along those lines, it will be possible to take that course; but I think that the two points are quite distinct. The first is whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer should take the money, which is the specific issue of the use of funds already in the Road Fund, and the second issue, covered by paragraph (b) of the Resolution, which will be voted upon after the Amendment has been disposed of, raises a matter of principle, namely, whether for years to come the Road Fund, as a distinct entity fed by funds which the Chancellor has specially to take by Resolution if he wishes to raid it, shall exist any longer. I suggest that those two are very distinct points, and though I would fall in, if it were the general wish of the House and your Ruling, with the idea that we should take the two discussions together, I would still prefer that they should be taken separately.

Mr. A. BEVAN: Further to the point of Order. I raised the point of Order to Mr. Speaker when the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Mabane) was addressing the House, and Mr. Speaker very distinctly said that, although he thought the two issues were intertwined, nevertheless he would permit a wide discussion on the Resolution itself. Indeed, I submit with every respect that it is more desirable that we should have the discussion on the general Resolution, because hon. Members might not feel disposed to support the Amendment, as by so doing they would be upsetting the balance of the Budget, but, having disposed of that point, they might feel themselves disposed to oppose the principle, because that would have no hearing what-

ever on the Budget. I therefore submit, in the interests of a proper discussion, that the discussion on the Amendment should be strictly confined to the point raised by the Amendment, and that it should be open to us to discuss the general Resolution afterwards.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Further to the point of Order. May I point out that one of the reasons which I gave in my Budget speech for asking that this sum should be transferred to the Exchequer was that I was about to propose the change embodied in the second part of this Resolution? It is difficult to defend the first part of the Resolution without raising the question of the second part. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I could find another reason if there had not been that one. I do not wish to deprive anybody of full opportunities of discussing the question; I was merely making the suggestion because thought it might be more convenient for the House.

Mr. E. J. WILLIAMS: On the point of Order. I can well understand that the point which the Chancellor has placed before the House would have been appropriate had he put it before the Amendment had been moved, but realising that the mover and seconder and supporters of the Amendment thus far have been narrowed to the terms of the Amendment, surely the right hon. Gentleman is taking advantage of the House.

Mr. MABANE: Further to the point of Order. As I was the speaker who was interrupted originally, may I say that it would be difficult for us to argue on the Amendment without including a good deal of discussion on the general Resolution, if we took the view that we could support the proposal made in paragraph (a) of the Resolution on account of the proposal contained in paragraph (b), and on that account only? Further, when I was interrupted I pointed out—and I think I was supported by the Chair—that the proposer and seconder of the Amendment had in fact ranged very widely indeed.

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER: I am in the hands of the House, of course, but it makes it very difficult, from the point of view both of hon. Members and of the Chair, if some hon. Members speaking to the Amendment are going to


discuss what is really the second part of the Resolution, if the Government are going to reply to that, and if then we are going to have the same Debate raised by other Members on the question, "That the House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution." If the House desires to take a general discussion on the whole of the Resolution on this Amendment, I see no objection to it.

HON. MEMBERS: No!

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAK ER: Then I think we had better confine ourselves to the Amendment.

Mr. MATHERS: In view of the obvious desire of the House and of your Ruling thereupon, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I will divorce my remarks entirely from the second part of the Resolution. It was simply in order to put the point that I wished to put on the Amendment, of the use of the money that is being appropriated by the Chancellor, and to enable him to understand the purport of a question which I wished to put to him, that I felt it necessary to say something about the general principle; and in any case I did not want to take part in the discussion on the general Resolution. I was saying that if the Committee supported this Amendment and thereby saved £4,000,000, I had a way in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer could expend that £4,000,000. A very strong urge has been going on for a number of years, and it has got stronger within the last few months, in favour of a very large grant of public money being made in order to build, first of all, a bridge across the Forth near Queensferry and, as an auxiliary to that, as a consequence almost of that, to build another road bridge over the Firth of Tay near Dundee. I want to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer in what way, if at all, the prospect of getting a grant from the Minister of Transport is being altered by the change that the right hon. Gentleman is making here.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Does the hon. Member mean the taking of the £5,250,000? If so, the answer is, "In no way."

Mr. MATHERS: The Chancellor, in saying that in no way whatever will there be a change, repeats a statement made by the Minister of Transport himself, and

yet I think that when Members come to deal with the second part of the Resolution, they must be convinced by the very nature of things that a change has been made. The point that I want to make in supporting the Amendment, in view of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said, is that here is the amount of money that we require for the building of these two bridges. We have striven to get a. declaration from the Government that they will make a grant of this amount in order to enable these bridges to be proceeded with. It is wrong that the money should be taken from the Road Fund while there is this opportunity of spending that money in a way that would provide not only a great national asset, but an opportunity for a vast amount of work in a part of Scotland which badly needs that work to be provided, and in a way that will not only affect that particular part of Scotland, but will provide employment in the steel district of Lanarkshire in providing the necessary material for the building, first of all, of the Forth road bridge and, secondly, of a bridge over the Tay as an accompaniment of it. It is for considerations like these and the fact that I believe there is a vast opportunity at the present time—a neglected opportunity I would call it—that I want to give an indication apart from what I have said of reasons for expenditure upon roads.
I have had the experience in my own constituency, in travelling by an ordinary passenger omnibus, of seeing people becoming positively ill because of the nature of the road, on account of the way in which the road had to be negotiated. I do not suggest that too great a speed was attempted, and I do not wish to use the expression that they were "seasick" in a omnibus, but naturally the feeling I had was that they were actually made seasick by the rocking of the omnibus, which was entirely due to the condition of the roads. There, it seems to me, is another indication of the need for a vast amount of expenditure to be incurred out of the Road Fund in order to enable such conditions to be remedied. So long as they are not remedied, there is no justifiaction whatever for this money being diverted from the purpose for which it was intended and taken out of the Road Fund by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be used for ordinary purposes.

5.16 p.m.

Mr. BEVAN: I wish to say a few words on the Amendment before the House passes to the general Resolution. On many questions I find it difficult to reconcile the attitude of hon. Members in the House with their private attitude. I suppose it would be impossible to talk on this subject to any hon. Member, no matter to what party he belonged, without his expressing the deepest feelings concerning the appalling casualties on the roads. Last year there were 228,000 people killed or injured on the highways of this country, and I believe every hon. Member will agree that that appalling casualty list could have been appreciably reduced had there been better roads. I think there can be no doubt that had there been cycling tracks, proper pathways for children, improved corners, non-skid surfaces, and so on, there would have been a very substantial reduction in the number of casualties. On that I think all are agreed. Yet hon. Members are discussing in a spirit of cynical indifference—I use the word advisedly, but hon. Members will see that the benches are almost empty—the appropriation of £5,250,000 that could very well have been spent by the Minister of Transport this year. The same thing happened last year.
Every month the newspapers of the country contain leading articles on the appalling number of casualties on the roads, those articles being written by special writers who try to rouse public opinion on this problem. Yet hon. Members opposite are supporting a Government which takes £5,250,000 that ought to have been spent to reduce those casualties. Hon. Members opposite do not attempt to justify the attitude they are taking, and I have not heard a single hon. Member this evening attempt to justify it. Either the Chancellor is to blame because he has prevented the Minister of Transport from spending the money, or the Minister of Transport is to blame. If the Minister of Transport is to blame—if the Chancellor of the Exchequer would have permitted him to spend the money and he deliberately did not spend it—he ought to resign, in face of that list of casualties. If, on the other hand, the Chancellor of the Exchequer prevented him from spending the money, the Chancellor ought to resign.
I submit to hon. Members that this is a problem which affects every member of the community. There is something rather appalling and grotesque in a child going out to play and in an hour coming in a mass of blood and bruises. The risk is one which is unnecessary, and I should have thought there would have been agreement among hon. Members that all the resources of finance, wisdom and experience, ought to be pooled in order to reduce the proportions of this tragedy. Instead of that, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a spirit of sarcasm, stands at the Treasury Box and enjoys raiding the Road Fund, as though in doing so he were showing himself to be a strong man and as though he wanted to get a reputation as a man who seems to delight in taking an unpopular course. For two years now he has raided the Road Fund and made himself the assassin of hundreds of little children. [Interruption,] Let hon. Members consider the facts and see whether the language is too strong. Admittedly there is in the fund a large amount of unexpended money. That is not denied. It is admitted also that the roads of the country need to have a great deal of money spent on them in order to make them safer. Therefore, is it not admitted that had the money been spent the roads would have been safer, and that if they had been safer the children would have been alive? How can you refute the submission that the Chancellor is a cynical assassin?

Mr. BERNAYS: On a point of Order. Is it in order for the hon. Member to describe a right hon. Gentleman in this House as a cynical assassin?

Mr. BOOTHBY: Further to that point of Order, may I mention the fact that much worse language has frequently in the past been applied to Ministers of the Crown?

Mr. BEVAN: I am amazed at the hon. Member's point of Order. The fact of the matter is that it is now impossible to state realities on the Floor of the House. Hon. Members have to speak with twisted tongues. It is impossible now in plain, ordinary language to describe the facts. I challenge any hon. Member to reply to what I have said, because there is not a single argument that can be used against it. No hon. Member can argue that, I am incorrect


in saying that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in refusing to permit this money to be spent, has made himself responsible for those deaths. That is the obvious and logical inference. If hon. Members say it is the fault of the Minister of Transport, then he must be described as an assassin.
These facts are appalling. In many areas of the country—in the area from which I come—there are scores of thousands of men who have been idle for four, five and six years and who might have been employed in repairing the roads; and yet we now find ourselves faced with this surplus of money in the Road Fund. Every authority responsible for the roads in the country has approached the Minister of Transport and asked for additional grants. Every week he has been approached. Schemes have been turned down. All we have had from the Minister of Transport and from the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been rhetoric about five years' plans, as though the local authorities of the country had not got the machinery with which to spend this money.
The reason the money is there is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, conspiring with the 'Minister of Transport, has prevented the local authorities from having the grants. A few years ago it was the practice of the Minister of Transport, in co-operation with the Minister of Health, to give 100 per cent. grants for the construction of many new roads in this country. Those grants have now almost entirely stopped, and local authorities have to pay from 50 to 75 per cent. of the cost of road construction, the result being that many of them cannot afford to construct roads. Even if the local authorities had reached their limit, that limit could have been raised if the Chancellor or the Minister of Transport had increased the percentage of grants.
If I have spoken with vehemence it is because the subject is one on which hon. Members ought to be vehement. There is not a single hon. Member who would dare to go to his constituency and defend the policy of not spending £5,250,000 on the roads; but hon. Members come to the House and discuss in art atmosphere of complete indifference the appropriation of £5,250,000 which might easily have been used to save the lives of children. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has a lop-

sided mind, for in one part of his Budget he proposes to give additional allowances for children, presumably because he wishes to encourage an increase in their numbers, and in the other part he appropriates money from the Road Fund which might easily have been used to keep children alive. I notice that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is smiling, but I see nothing to smile about. If in this matter the right hon. Gentleman had a little more imagination and a little more of what he calls arithmetical probity, we might have been able to get a move on, but the Chancellor is notoriously lacking in imagination. The proposals are a disgrace, and I submit to hon. Members that unless they are able to make a reasonable and decent reply to the arguments which have been advanced against them, they ought in decency to prevent the Chancellor of the Exchequer from raiding the Road Fund in this way.

5.28 p.m.

Mr. C. S. TAYLOR: I will not deal very long with what I consider to be a disgusting and disgraceful attack upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer. To my mind the Chancellor has not said that he would not spend £5,250,000 upon the roads, but has stated that he is willing to provide enough money out of the Exchequer for the upkeep of the roads. I submit that it is not money but legislation that will prevent accidents. It is a question of imposing certain rectrictions upon motorists and pedestrians alike, and inculcating into their minds the necessity for road safety. I consider that no one has done that better than the present Minister of Transport, and that under no Government to date has there been so much improvement both in our roads and in our traffic regulations.
I do not wish to see too much money spent on the roads under present conditions. The money which has been spent on many of the roads in this country has been wasted because the local authorities which had power to construct those roads did not know what was the best type of road. For some time past I have pressed for the establishment of a central highways board, which would be able to control road services and to see that money was not wasted on putting down roads which have "skiddy" surfaces. I submit that the solution of the accident problem is to provide a uniform system of road surfaces and lighting, as well as uni-


formity in other matters appertaining to the roads. I support the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his so-called raid on the Road Fund and I hope that the Government will see fit to establish a central highways board in the near future. I do not suggest that such a board should be directly responsible for all the roads in the country. They would have to delegate responsibility to local boards but they should be indirectly responsible for the general system of road communications in the country.

5.31 p.m.

Mr. DINGLE FOOT: The hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. C. S. Taylor) is apparently willing to set up all kinds of new authorities in order to construct roads, but he entirely fails to say how those roads are to be paid for, and that is the point which is in the mind of most of us this afternoon. The line of argument which has run through most of the speeches during the last hour has been directed towards the effect of this proposal on the road system and on the efforts of the Ministry of Transport to reduce the number of road accidents. In spite of what was said a short time ago by the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Mabane) I submit that this is not only a Treasury matter. I suppose there is not a Member here who does not realise that the proposal to transfer this £5,000,000 is the preliminary to transferring the whole fund next year, and that it is going to have a considerable effect on the activities and on the status of the Ministry of Transport.
I wish to reinforce the observations made by several hon. Members above the Gangway on the fact that neither the Minister of Transport nor the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport is present on this occasion when we are debating a matter which is obviously of great importance to that Department. Neither of them has seen fit to be here at any time during this Debate and I think that when a subject of this kind is under discussion we have a right to expect the attendance of a representative of that Ministry. In order to call attention to their absence, I beg to move, "That this House do now adjourn."

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER,: being of opinion that the Motion was an abuse of

the Rules of the House, declined to propose the Question thereupon to the House.

5.34 p.m.

Mr. GALLAGHER: I wish to reinforce the argument advanced by the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Mathers) who spoke earlier about people being sick on the roads. [Laughter.] Hon. Members appear to take a great deal of fun out of the fact of people being sick and being killed on the roads. The hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan) made what was regarded as an offensive reference to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he might have used the term in the plural instead of the singular and included in the accusation a lot of the Chancellor's supporters. I was in an omnibus the other night with a brother-in-law of the hon. Member for Bridgeton (Mr. Maxton), a gentleman of the cloth, and in the omnibus a woman passenger became so sick that she had to stagger to the door. That is an actual experience showing the condition of the roads. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury spoke the other night about schemes for a road here and a road there, but instead of providing money for new roads the Government are taking that money away from new road works. Instead of making new roads they are relaying an old road, the road that led to 1914, the road that led to death and desolation.
I want to know why there is such a persistent refusal, for instance, to put down money for a road bridge across the Forth. Nobody can go through that area without recognising the urgent need for such a bridge. The money is there and the labour is there. The Government are encouraging the establishment of a steelworks in one of the derelict areas and the steel girders could be made there. The bridge could be started at any moment. Hon. Members say they want to see money used to provide employment. I ask them to use their power and influence to stop this attempt to divert money which is so urgently deeded for this purpose at the present time. A bridge across the Forth may cost a million or so, but instead of that, hon. Members are prepared to spend £10,000,000 or £20,000,000 or even £100,000,000 on a bridge across the Jordan and will drive the youth across it like sheep to the slaughter. We do not want money wasted on weapons


of destruction. Apparently, in the view of the Financial Secretary and his colleagues the making of guns and bombs is a work of great national importance but to make the roads safe for the people of the country is not a question of national importance. I see that the hon. Lady the Member for Dundee (Miss Horsbrugh) nods her head.

Miss HORSBRUGH: No, I was shaking my head, because I think the roads would not be safe for the people if there were no means of defending the people against attack.

Mr. GALLACHER: When the hon. Lady shakes her head I understand there is nothing in it. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] But everybody recognises that bad roads are unsafe in these days, when there is so much heavy motor traffic and children are in danger all the time they are about the roads. I have been in a car which was thrown into the ditch, not through bad driving but through the badness of the road, and I have known of many cases of people being killed or injured as a result of faulty roads, which make it impossible to exercise any real judgment in driving. It is necessary that we should have the best and widest possible roads in every locality if we are to reduce the number of accidents. We are living in days when the road has become popular. All our roads carry continuous streams of traffic of all kinds and you cannot spend too much in widenings and improvements which will help to ensure safety. I join in the protest against this raid on the Road Fund, and I echo all that has been said by the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale. I do not consider that he used insulting language. No doubt it is very sad for hon. Members opposite to listen to their Chancellor of the Exchequer being attacked in the terms used by the hon. Member, but I dare say that-the right hon. Gentleman had harder things said about him last night by hon. Members opposite though they did not express their views openly in the House. However sad it may be to hon. Members opposite to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to in that way, it is sadder still for a mother to gather up the dead body of her child on the road. There is no reason whatever why these children should be sacrificed.
In every area we find that where the streets are narrowest and the traffic

densest the greater number of accidents occur. There was a place somewhere about West Ham which used to be called "Death Corner" or some such name, where children were killed every week because of the character of the thoroughfare and the amount of traffic. I consider that it is a crime against the people of this country and especially against the children of this country that there should be such an act of robbery as is here proposed. If "robbery" is not the proper term to use, perhaps some other hon. Member can supply the correct term. But this is a proposal to take away £5,250,000 which ought to be at the disposal of the local authorities for the purpose of making the roads safe for the people of the country and especially the children. In conclusion I again appeal to the Financial Secretary to tell us what is the objection to the making of a grant for a road bridge across the Forth. I repeat that such a bridge is a necessity, that it will provide work for the unemployed and will be of the greatest advantage to that countryside; and I hope we shall be told why a blank wall is opposed to us every time we try to get some consideration for that project.

5.45 p.m.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I propose in my reply to try to confine myself as nearly as possible to the Amendment, in view of the desire of hon. Members opposite for a further discussion of the wider question of the Resolution as a whole, but if I am to deal adequately with the position I cannot entirely leave out of account the second part of the Resolution. This question of the withdrawal of £5,250,000 from the Road Fund has been the subject of much windy declamation and denunciation, most of which has been founded upon a complete misunderstanding of the effect of the second part of the Resolution. I do not think that the hon. Members on the other side who have spoken have a very good idea of how the Road Fund is administered. Let me say once again that you cannot take money and throw it about here and there without previous preparation, nor can you listen to any particular Member who happens to have a loud voice and advocates the claims of his particular locality without reference to the claims of other localities. These things have to be done on a system and according to rule. You have to lay down categories of roads and


definite percentages of grants that should be given to each category. You cannot burst through all these rules and make exceptions simply because there is an outcry from one particular Member or locality.
It takes a considerable time to prepare for any extensive programme of road improvement or construction. First, the plans have to be considered, discussed and checked, and after they have been made and the proposal has been submitted by the local authority to the Ministry of Transport and arrangements have been made between the Ministry and the local authority—

Mr. BROOKE: The plans submitted for road schemes are often turned down.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: That is precisely what I am saying. There has been a lot of preparation, and, even after the local authorities have submitted the plans, they have to be considered by the Ministry of Transport, and it is possible that consent may not be given, as the plans may not be considered to be good plans. Even after the plans have been agreed to, it may be some considerable time before money can be spent upon the actual work. It may be that land has to be acquired, that contracts have to be placed, that material has to be accumulated, or that a road which has been carried to a certain distance meets with some obstruction, and that there is some difficulty in carrying it through. In a great number of ways it is difficult beforehand to say exactly at what moment it will be possible to begin a particular work of construction and at what moment it will be possible to end it.
Some hon. Members opposite have said that this surplus had no business to be in the Road Fund. I cannot understand what they mean by that, but what I have said about the difficulty of estimating, beforehand how fast money can be spent when the commitments have already been entered into will give one reason why it is impossible to estimate accurately the amount of money that may be left in the Fund at the end of a particular year. Of course, there is another point. There is an income of the Road Fund as well as an expenditure, and one of my objections to the present system is that that income is in no way related to the needs of the

Road Fund but is merely the varying produce of a particular duty which may or may not be equivalent to the needs of the Fund. As a matter of fact, the produce of the duty has been growing rapidly as the number of cars in use has increased, and that, of course, is one reason why the surplus is in the Road Fund to-day. It would have been impossible to prevent it getting there unless you had taken steps to prevent a certain number of cars from coming on the road and paying the Licence Duty.
It is stated that the withdrawal of this sum out of the Road Fund, the Minister of Transport will be prevented from carrying out certain works which would contribute to the value of the roads or to the safety of the public. I do not subscribe to the theory that you can measure the safety of the roads by the amount of money you spend on them. The proof of that is to be found in the fact that the more money that has been spent on the roads the larger has been the number of accidents. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] The facts cannot be denied, and I ask hon. Members whether they can deny that fact.

Mr. BEVAN: Does the right hon. Gentleman seriously suggest that the fact that there are more accidents when more money has been spent on the roads is a case of cause and effect?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not know whether that question is serious, but my statement is serious. I certainly do say that the more roads there are and the more cars there are on the roads contribute to the accidents, and that if you make more roads you make more opportunities for accidents. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] All I am saying is that there is no direct relation between the amount of money spent on the roads and the number of accidents.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: There sits opposite the Chairman of the Surrey County Council, and he can bear out what the right hon. Gentleman says, for since the Kingston by-pass was opened, after an immense amount of money had been spent on it, the place has been nothing but a butcher's shop.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: It will probably be agreed by a good many hon. Members that the consciousness of motorists and the care and attention which they can be


induced to give to their driving have more effect in stopping accidents than anything else. It is a fact that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport has done more than any other Minister has clone to reduce the number of accidents by calling the attention of motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and everyone else who uses the roads to the necessity of reducing this toll of life.
Having made that remark about the connection between accidents and the money spent on roads, let me go on to say that it is a fallacy to suggest that the use of this £5,250,000 this year for purposes other than the Road Fund will deprive the Minister of Transport in future of any expenditure which Parliament may be willing to sanction for road works. The second part of the Resolution proposes a new procedure altogether, and if I am taking this £5,250,000 now from the Road Fund, and if thereafter that amount of money is wanted, Parliament has only to vote it and it will be restored to the Road Fund. In future, instead of the Road Fund being limited by the amount of money which is produced by the Licence Duty in any one year, it will be limited only by the will of Parliament.

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: The right hon. Gentleman says that Parliament can vote this money, but is it not a fact that it will only be on the initiative of the Government that Parliament can vote it?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: It has always been on the initiative of the Government, but if the Government are not spending enough money the House can turn them out. The hon. and gallant Member for Pembroke (Major Lloyd George) made an interesting speech in which he endeavoured to sustain the argument that the Fund was instituted for the purpose of devoting the whole proceeds of the Motor Licence Duty to the roads, and that it was a diversion of the purpose for which the Fund was instituted to use the money for anything else. The hon. and gallant Member has a hereditary interest in this matter, and I do not quarrel with him for reminding us of the circumstances in which the Fund was instituted, but I would say to him in all seriousness that the situation to-day is very different from what it was at the time when the Road Fund was established. He himself spoke of the new means of propulsion, and it is true that at the time of which he spoke it was a

comparatively new means of propulsion that had just occurred and there was need for a very exceptional effort to get the people of the country to understand the new importance which roads had taken on in view of this new method of propulsion.
That, to my mind, was a justification at that time for the exceptional view that it was desirable to earmark this form of revenue for this particular purpose. That time has passed away now, however. There is no need to remind the public to-day about the necessity for roads or for new roads or wider roads, as there was in the past. It is a thing that is dinned into us every day, and as long as a number of the public to-day use a car or a motor cycle or a cycle and have their daily attention called to the value and importance of the roads in our national system, it, cannot be said that there is any call for the exceptional treatment of the roads. I am not now going to enter into any further defence of the proposal in the second part of the Resolution, because that is not what is dealt with by the Amendment. Once again, I call the attention of hon. Members to the fact that cannot be denied that the Road Fund programme is in no way suffering from the removal at this moment of this £5,250,000, which cannot be spent. The commitments that must be entered into before it could be spent have already been entered into, and there is enough money for them in the fund. If the £5,250,000 needs to be spent, it can be provided in future years.

5.57 p.m.

Mr. HOLD SWORTH: For two or three years I have spoken on the Finance Bill with regard to the duties levied on vehicles, and every time we have had the argument trotted out that the House did not understand how the money is raised for the Road Fund. Every time the Chancellor has reiterated that it takes a certain amount of time in order to draft road schemes. There is no one in the House who is ignorant of these matters, and we do not need to be told by the Chancellor once again how the Road Fund is raised and how there is a certain interval of time before a scheme can be brought into operation. We are aware of that, and we are aware also that for two or three years local authorities have not been encouraged, as they ought to have been, to bring


schemes into operation. Had they been encouraged two or three years ago to forward schemes to the Ministry of Transport this £5,250,000 which is now in the fund could have been brought into practical application at this moment.
The Chancellor did not deny what the hon. and gallant Member for Pembroke (Major Lloyd George) said as to the purposes of this fund when it was inaugurated, but he argued that circumstances were now different. Last night, in order to get out of another argument, he told us that we could not compare direct taxation with indirect taxation because the fiscal system had altered and the circumstances were different. It seems to be his favourite argument. While it is true that circumstances have changed in the degree of the necessity of the Road Fund, it is also true that it is more desirable than ever that there should be a Road Fund because of the added traffic on the road compared with the time when the fund was inaugurated.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Does the hon. Member understand that there will still be a Road Fund?

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: Yes, and we understand also that when the right hon. Gentleman has taken the money he will be able to come to the House and say, "We cannot afford this expenditure, we want the money for other purposes." The right hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that the House has absolutely no chance of stopping a Chancellor, with a majority behind him such as the present Chancellor has, if he decides to take this money for other purposes. It is idle to tell the House that it has control. In theory, Yes, in practice, No. So long as it is said from that Box that the money is wanted for other purposes the House will have no chance of voting the money for the roads. When the Finance Bill is discussed I shall take the opportunity, if I have the good fortune to be called upon to speak, to oppose this proposal that the Road Fund, which I look upon as a trading Department, shall be taken over by the Chancellor. I was astounded to hear the Chancellor say that the more money we spent on roads the more accidents there would be. It is true that in theory that observation could be justified, but more accidents do not

follow because more money is spent on the roads but because there are more vehicles on the roads. The hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. A. Bevan) put a very good point when he asked whether it was suggested that it was a case of cause and effect.
Why does not the Chancellor come to the House and say frankly, "I need this money for other purposes,"—and not try to ride off on any question of accidents on the roads? If the Government regarded the situation with respect to road accidents seriously they would realise that there are plenty of opportunities for using this money for the specific purpose for which it was raised, and I hope that every hon. Member who is interested in the question of road accidents will say, "The people who possess vehicles pay this money for this specific purpose and by my vote I will not allow it to be used for any other purpose." It would be far better if the Chancellor were frank with the House as to why he is taking the money, not trying to defend his action by a, specious argument that the more money that is spent upon roads the more accidents there will be, because such an argument is unworthy of him.

6.3 p.m.

Mr. EDE: I should not have spoken but for the fact that I was directly challenged by the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel). He drew attention to a particular road and suggested that it had been turned into a butcher's shop. If the statement behind his suggestion is true, I think it was ill-timed levity on his part to refer to the accidents on that road in such a way. Daniel O'Connell once saw Sir Robert Peel sitting on the Treasury Bench and smiling, and remarked, "The smile becomes the right hon. Gentleman's face as well as a silver lid would become a coffin," and I think the same retort ought to be made to the attempted jocularity of the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: Will the hon. Member explain what he means?

Mr. EDE: The hon. Baronet alluded to a certain highway on which it is notorious that a number of accidents have occurred, and said that it had been turned into a butcher's shop.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: Is not that true?

Mr. EDE: No, it is not. I certainly do not regard dead human beings as butcher's meat, and think that the hon. Baronet might very well have chosen some more appropriate figure of speech. I do not mind taking that road as an example. Four or five years ago there were as many motor licences in the county of Surrey, in proportion to population, as there were in the United States, although as a country we were supposed to have far fewer motor cars proportionately than the United States. Every year since has created a record in the issue of new licences in that county. There has been such an addition to the traffic that roads which 10 or 12 years ago were regarded not merely as adequate but as indicating that considerable foresight had been shown in their planning, have come to be hopelessly inadequate. Sometimes I go along the Kingston by-pass and at other times through the main streets of Kingston, and I venture to say that any one who was acquainted with Kingston before and after the construction of the by-pass will agree that there is more traffic in Kingston to-day than before the by-pass was built.
The Minister talked about the relation between the expenditure on roads and the number of deaths, but is it not the fact that this £5,250,000 remains in the Road Fund because the revenue derived from the increase in the number of motor cars has not been spent but has been allowed to accumulate? The very provision which was made in 1909 to enable the roads to meet the demands which were being made upon them has been destroyed. It is notorious that until just before the General Election local authorities were discouraged from submitting big schemes. Only when the General Election was approaching and it was necessary to have some tale to tell to wipe off the arrears of the previous five years were local authorities called upon for schemes; and nobody knows better than the right hon. Gentleman, whose chief claim to fame rather than to notoriety is that he has been a successful Lord Mayor of Birmingham, that you cannot get local authorities suddenly to reverse the engine.
The fact that £5,250,000 is still in the Road Fund and that there has been delay in preparing schemes is entirely due to

the policy of the Government in the last Parliament. There is not a single county council which is showing a reduction of rates for the year 1936–37 as compared with 1935–36. Most of them are showing substantial increases, because they are now called upon to shoulder the new five-year programme which was brought forth just before the General Election. This £5,250,000 ought to be left in the fund to enable road works to be financed. I hope I may be allowed to follow the Minister as far as he went into the second part of the Resolution. I do not want to do more than that, because I realise the desire on this side of the House to have a general discussion afterwards, but I view with great concern the fact that in future the Ministry of Transport will in this respect be under Treasury control.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: indicated dissent.

Mr. EDE: In the last eight or nine lines of the Resolution there appear these words:
The Minister of Transport may, with the consent of the Treasury.
That puts the Minister of Transport under Treasury control in these matters.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: He is under it now.

Mr. EDE: But, after all, there is the knowledge that this sum of money is available. In future, after we have secured the consent of the Minister of Transport to any scheme, we shall be told that we must get the consent of the Treasury. That is what we are frequently told in education matters. I see the President of the Board of Education on the Treasury Bench. Perhaps he is there in place of the Minister of Transport because he was the Minister of Transport before the present Minister. It is my view that the Chancellor has this afternoon treated the House to nothing more than a series of jests, with his particular form of logic about accidents.
The growth of traffic on the roads makes it highly essential that roads which were laid down only a few years ago should have further consideration. As the hon. Baronet knows, the Kingston by-pass is now being divided into two parallel tracks, so as to prevent head-on collisions, and I venture to say that a great number of other roads will have to


be similarly treated. Just before the Easter vacation I left this House at 20 minutes to eight one evening and went along the Holyhead road as far as Lichfield. I was astonished at the amount of heavy traffic on that road between 10 and 11 o'clock at night. It makes it essential, in my opinion, that that road should in the near future undergo an elaborate widening. There is not a single road leading from London to the South Coast resorts which ought not to be doubled in width. There is a general desire in the country that footpaths should be provided beside every road which carries any substantial amount of traffic. All these are works which ought to be met out of this fund.
The right hon. Gentleman said in his Budget speech that when he came to look for money he discovered an anomaly in the Road Fund and that he was going to abolish it. I can only think that it was not the anomaly but the £5,250,000 which attracted his eagle eye, and that if it had been a deficit of £5,000,000 the anomaly might very well have been allowed to continue. I hope the House will show that it does regard the action of the Chancellor as a retrograde step and will take every opportunity of saying that this road expenditure ought to be financed out of this particular fund.

6.13 p.m.

Mr. McGOVERN: I agree with the denunciation of the action of the Chancellor in taking £5,250,000 from the Road Fund, but I certainly do not agree with the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) in regarding the remark of the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel) as being of an insulting character or as treating human life with levity. The hon. Baronet only used a quite common term in dealing with accidents. Even when a man has cut his hand and blood is scattered around people will say "You are making the place like a butcher's shop." As to the statement of the Chancellor that the more money that is spent on roads the greater the number of accidents, he simply put the cart before the horse. If he had said "There are a greater number of motor cars on the road; then you are compelled to build more roads and get more traffic; and as a consequence you have a larger number of accidents," it would have been

all right. All that was wrong with his statement was that he put the cart before the horse.
Three or four weeks ago I was induced to keep a friend company on a night journey by car from London to Glasgow. We went along the Great North Road, and after we had wit beyond London we ran into a fog, I suppose a ground fog, which was very thick. For 60 or 70 miles the driver had to keep peering through the glass, and the strain of doing so must have been tremendous. I discovered an amount of heavy traffic on that road such as I never suspected was on the roads of this country during the night, and it occurred to me that money ought to be spent to illuminate such roads from end to end because of that traffic. That would ensure against accidents, and would protect life and add to the comfort and convenience of those who use the roads during the night. The cost should be borne by a fund like the Road Fund.
The Chancellor said that there would still be a Road Fund. Might I add to the Chancellor's statement that while it is true that accidents have increased with the increase in the number of motor cars which have taken the road, it is also true that had money not been spent during the last five years the number of accidents would now be much greater than it is? To take £5,250,000 out of this fund is, in my estimation and without using language that is extreme, criminal. That is simply a statement of fact without being extreme in any way. The money ought to be used for the protection of human life. We are told that there is money for the widening and construction of roads. I could point to a large number of death-traps that should be removed from the roads in Lanarkshire, particularly surrounding Glasgow. We are told that questions relating to bridges often become disputes among the railway company concerned, the local authority and the transport Department, but such death-traps should be removed. If you abolish the fund you remove the opportunity of adding that amount of protection to human life and for that reason the £5,250,000 should be retained in the fund.
We know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his extremity to get money for death-dealing instruments of warfare, has had to raid other funds. This fund,


which is subscribed for the protection of human life, is taken for the destruction of human life, and that is the real reason why I object to the abolition of it. I would say, in passing, that in order to be logical we should oppose the imposition of the extra 3d. upon the Income Tax because that money, too, is being used for the armaments to which we are opposed. The Road Fund was subscribed by users of vehicles for the maintenance and construction of roads. When the Chancellor uses the cheap argument that this House can pass the necessary legislation for the construction of roads, we remember the limitation upon the power of an Opposition or of a Private Member to induce the House to vote sums

of money. It is usually impossible to do so because the Government has a docile majority, as almost all Governments have had, upon which to depend to vote down any demand that may be made from other sides of the House. If there is a Division in connection with this fund, I shall certainly go into the Lobby in its favour, because I am against the taking away of money which ought to be used for the protection of human life but is being devoted to the destruction of human life.

Question put, "That the word 'five' stand part of the Resolution."

The House divided: Ayes, 267; Noes, 124.

Division No. 153.]
AYES.
[6.20 p.m.


Acland-Troyte, Lt.-Col. G. J.
Courthope, Col. Sir G. L.
Heligers, Captain F. F. A.


Adams, S. V. T. (Leeds, W.)
Craddock, Sir R. H.
Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel A. P.


Agnew, Lieut.-Comdr. P. G.
Croft, Brig.-Gen. Sir H. Page
Hepburn, P. G. T. Buchan-


Albery, I. J.
Crooke, J. S.
Hepworth, J.


Allen, Lt.-Col. J. Sandeman (B'kn'hd.)
Crookshank, Capt. H. F. C.
Herbert, Major J. A. (Monmouth)


Amery, Rt. Hon. L. C. M. S.
Cross, R. H.
Herbert, Captain S. (Abbey)


Anstruther-Gray, W. J.
Crossley, A. C.
Hills, Major Rt. Hon. J. W. (Ripon)


Aske, Sir R. W.
Culverwell, C. T.
Holmes, J. S.


Assheton, R.
Davidson, Rt. Hon. Sir.J. C. C.
Hope, Captain Hon. A. O. J.


Astor, Major Hon. J. J. (Dover)
Davies, C. (Montgomery)
Horne, Rt. Hon. Sir R. S.


Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley
Davies, Major G. F. (Yeovil)
Horsbrugh, Florence


Barclay-Harvey, C. M.
Davison, Sir W. H.
Howltt, Dr. A. B.


Beauchamp, Sir B. C.
Dawson, Sir P.
Hudson, Capt. A. U. M. (Hack., N.)


Beaumont, Hon. R. E. B. (Portsm'h)
De Chair, S. S.
Hudson, R. S. (Southport)


Belt, Sir A. L.
Denman, Hon. R. D.
Hulbert, N. J.


Bernays, R. H.
Despencer-Robertson, Major J. A. F.
Hume, Sir G. H.


Birchall, Sir J. D.
Dorman-Smith, Major R. H.
Hunter, T.


Bird, Sir R. B.
Dower, Capt. A. V. G.
Hurd, Sir P. A.


Blair, Sir R.
Drewe, C.
Jackson, Sir H.


Bllndell, Sir J.
Duckworth, G. A. V. (Salop)
James, Wing-Commander A. W.


Boothby, R. J. G.
Duckworth, W. R. (Moss Side)
Jones, Sir G. W. H. (S'k N'w'gt'n)


Bossom, A. C.
Dugdale, Major T. L.
Keeling, E. H.


Boulton, W. W.
Duggan, H. J.
Keyes, Admiral of the Fleet Sir R.


Bowater, Col. Sir T. Vansittart
Duncan, J. A. L.
Kirkpatrick, W. M.


Bower, Comdr. R. T.
Dunglass, Lord
Lamb, Sir J. O.


Bowyer, Capt. Sir G. E. W.
Dunne, P. R. R.
Lambert, Rt. Hon. G.


Boyce, H. Leslie
Eckersley, P. T.
Latham, Sir P.


Briscoe, Capt. R. G.
Edmondson, Major Sir J.
Law, R. K. (Hull, S.W.)


Brocklebank, C. E. R.
Emery, J. F.
Leckie, J. A.


Brown, Rt. Hon. E. (Leith)
Emmott, C. E. G. C.
Leech, Dr. J. W.


Brown, Brig.-Gen. H. C. (Newbury)
Emrys-Evans, P. V.
Leighton, Major B. E. P.


Browne, A. C. (Belfast, W.)
Entwistle, C. F.
Levy, T.


Bull, B. B.
Erskine Hill, A. G.
Lewis, O.


Burton, Col. H. W.
Evans, Capt. A. (Cardiff, S.)
Liddall, W. S.


Butler, R. A.
Everard, W. L.
Lindsay, K. M.


Campbell, Sir E. T.
Fox, Sir G. W. G.
Lloyd, G. W.


Cartland, J. R. H.
Fremantle, Sir F. E.
Loder, Captain Hon. J. de V.


Cary, R. A.
Furness, S. N.
Loftus, P. C.


Castlereagh, Viscount
Fyfe, D. P. M.
Lovat-Fraser, J. A.


Cautley, Sir H. S.
Ganzonl, Sir J.
Lumley, Capt. L. R.


Cazalet, Thelma (Islington, E.)
Gledhill, G.
Mabane, W. (Huddersfield)


Cazalet, Capt. V. A. (Chlppenham)
Gluckstein, L. H.
MacAndrew, Lt.-Col. Sir C. G.


Cecil, Rt. Hon. Lord Hugh
Goldle, N. B.
M'Connell, Sir J.


Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. N (Edgb't'n)
Gower, Sir R. V.
McCorquodale, M. S.


Channon, H.
Grattan-Doyle, Sir N.
MacDonald, Sir Murdoch (Inverness)


Chapman, A. (Rutherglen)
Gridley, Sir A. B.
Macdonald, Capt. P. (Isle of Wight)


Chapman, Sir S. (Edinburgh, S.)
Grimston, R. V.
McEwen, Capt. J. H. F.


Chorlton, A. E. L.
Guest, Hon. I. (Brecon and Radnor)
McKie, J. H.


Clarke, F. E.
Gunston, Capt. D. W.
Maclay, Hon. J. P.


Clarry, Sir Reginald
Guy,.J. C. M.
Macmillan, H. (Stockton-on-Tees)


Cobb, Sir C. S.
Hacking, Rt. Hon. D. H.
Magnay, T.


Collins, Rt. Hon. Sir G. P.
Hamilton, Sir G. C.
Maklns, Brig. Gen. E.


Colville, Lt.-Col. D. J.
Hanbury, Sir C.
Manningham-Buller, Sir M.


Cook, T. R. A. M. (Norfolk, N.)
Hannah, I. C.
Margesson, Capt. Rt. Hon H. D. R.


Cooke, J. D. (Hammersmith, S.)
Harbord, A.
Mason, Lt.-Col. Hon. G. K. M.


Cooper, Rt. Hon. T. M. (E'nburgh, W.)
Hartington, Marquess of
Mayhew, Lt.-Cal. J.


Courtauld, Major.J. S.
Haslam, Sir J. (Bolton)
Mellor, Sir J. S. P. (Tamworth)




Mills, Sir F. (Leyton, E.)
Reid, W. Allan (Derby)
Stourton, Hon. J. J.


Mills, Major J. D. (New Forest)
Rickards, G. W. (Skipton)
Strauss, E. A. (Southwark, N.)


Mitchell, H. (Brentford and Chiswick)
Ropner, Colonel L.
Strauss, H. G. (Norwich)


Moreing, A. C.
Ross Taylor, W. (Woodbridge)
Strickland, Captain W. F.


Morgan, R. H.
Rowlands, G.
Stuart, Lord C. Crichton- (N'thw'h)


Morrison, G. A. (Scottish Univ's.)
Ruggles-Brise, Colonel St. E. A.
Stuart, Hon. J. (Moray and Nairn)


Morrison, W. S. (Cirencester)
Runciman. Rt. Hon. W.
Sutcliffe, H.


Muirhead, Lt.-Col. A. J
Russell, A. West (Tynemouth)
Tate, Mavis C.


Munro, P.
Russell, R. J. (Eddisbury)
Taylor, C. S. (Eastbourne)


Neven-Spence, Maj. B. H. H.
Russell, S. H. M. (Darwen)
Taylor, Vice-Adm. E. A. (Padd., S.)


Nicolson, Hon. H. G.
Salt, E. W.
Thomas, J, P. L. (Hereford)


O'Neill, Major Rt. Hon. Sir Hugh
Samuel, Sir A. M. (Farnham)
Thomson, Sir J. D. W.


Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. G.
Sandys, E. D.
Titchfield. Marquess of


Orr-Ewing, I. L.
Savery, Servington
Tree, A. R. L. F.


Palmer, G. E. H.
Scott, Lord William
Tufnell, Lieut.-Com. R. L.


Patrick, C. M.
Selley, H. R.
Turton, R. H.


Peake, O.
Shakespeare, G. H.
Wakefield, W. W.


Peat, C. U.
Shaw, Major P. S. (Wavertree)
Ward, Lieut.-Col. Sir A. L. (Hull)


Percy, Rt. Hon. Lord E.
Shepperson, Sir E. W.
Ward, Irene (Wallsend)


Petherick, M.
Simon, Rt. Hon. Sir J. A.
Warrender, Sir V.


Pickthorn, K. W. M.
Sinclair, Col. T. (Queen's U. B'll'st)
Waterhouse, Captain C.


Pilkington, R.
Smiles, Lieut.-Colonel Sir W. D.
Wayland, Sir W. A.


Porritt, R. W.
Smith, L. W. (Hallam)
Wedderburn, H. J. S.


Pownall, Sir Assheton
Smith, Sir R. W. (Aberdeen)
Wells, S. R.


Radford, E. A.
Somerset, T.
Wickham, Lt.-Col. E. T. R.


Raikes, H. V. A. M.
Somervell, Sir D. B. (Crewe)
Williams, H. G. (Croydon. S.)


Ramsbotham, H.
Somerville, A. A. (Windsor)
Wilson, Lt.-Col, Sir A. T. (Hitchla)


Ramsden, Sir E.
Southby, Comdr. A. R. J.
Womersley, Sir W. J.


Rathbone, Eleanor (English Univ's.)
Spens, W. P.
Wood, Rt. Hon. Sir Kingsley


Rathbone, J. R. (Bodmin)
Stanley, Rt. Hon. Lord (Fylde)



Rayner, Major R. H.
Stanley, Rt. Hon. Oliver (W'm'i'd)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES —


Reed, A. C. (Exeter)
Stewart, J. Henderson (Fife, E.)
Dr. Morris-Jones and Lieut.-Col.


Reid, Sir D. D. (Down)
Storey, S.
Llewellin.




NOES.


Acland, Rt. Hon. Sir F. Dyke
Hall, G. H. (Aberdare)
Paling, W.


Adams, D. (Consett)
Hall, J. H. (Whitechapel)
Parker, H. J. H.


Adams, D. M. (Poplar, S.)
Hardie, G. D.
Parkinson, J. A.


Adamson, W. M.
Harris, Sir P. A.
Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.


Ammon. C. G.
Henderson. A. (Kingswinford)
Potts, J.


Anderson. F. (Whitehaven)
Henderson, T. (Tradeston)
Pritt, D. N.


Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.
Holdsworth. H.
Ritson, J.


Barnes, A. J.
Holland, A.
Roberts. Rt. Hon. F. O. (W. Srom.)


Barr, J.
Hollins, A.
Roberts. W. (Cumberland, N.)


Bellenger, F.
Jagger, J.
Rowson, G.


Benson, G.
Jenkins, A. (Pontypool)
Seely, Sir H. M.


Bevan, A.
Jenkins, Sir W. (Neath)
Sexton, T. M. Shlnwell, E.


Brooke, W.
John, W.
Shinwell, E.


Brown, Rt. Hon. J. (S. Ayrshire)
Johnston, Rt. Hon. T.
Short, A.


Buchanan, G.
Jones, A. C. (Shipley)
Silverman. S. S.


Burke, W. A.
Jones, H. Haydn (Merloneth)
Simpson, F. B.


Cape, T.
Kelly, W. T.
Sinclair, Rt. Hon. Sir A. (C'thn's)


Cassells, T.
Kennedy, Rt. Hon. T.
Smith, Ben (Rotherhithe)


Chater, D.
Kirby, B. V.
Smith, E. (Stoke)


Cluse, W. S.
Kirkwood. D.
Sorensen, R. W.


Cocks, F S.
Lathan, G.
Stephen, C.


Compton, J.
Lawson, J. J.
Stewart, W. J. (H'ght'n-le-Sp'ng)


Cove, W. G.
Leach, W.
Strauss, G. R. (Lambeth, N.)


Daggar, G.
Lee, F.
Taylor, R..J. (Morpeth)


Davidson, J. J. (Maryhill)
Leonard, W.
Thurtie, E.


Davies, R. J. (Westhoughton)
Leslie, J. R.
Tinker, J. J.


Day, H.
Logan, D. G.
Viant, S. P.


Dunn, E. (Rother Valley)
Lunn, W.
Walkden, A. G.


Ede, J. C.
Macdonald. G. (Ince)
Watkins. F. C.


Edwards, Sir C. (Bedwellty)
McGhee. H. G.
Watson. W. McL.


Fletcher. Lt.-Comdr. R. T. H.
McGovern, J.
Welsh, J. C.


Foot, D. M.
Mac Laren, A.
Westwood, J.


Frankel. D.
Maclean, N.
White, H. Graham


Gallacher. W.
Malnwaring, W. H.
Whiteley, W.


George, Major G. Lloyd (Pembroke)
Mander, G. le M.
Wilkinson, Ellen


George, Megan Lloyd (Anglesey)
Marklew, E.
Williams, E. J. (Ogmore)


Gibbins, J.
Marshall, F.
Wilson, C. H. (Attercliffe)


Graham, D. M. (Hamilton)
Milner, Major J.
Windsor. W. (Hull, C.)


Greenwood, Rt. Hon. A.
Montague, F.
Woods, G. S. (Finsbury)


Griffith, F. Kingsley (M'ddl'sbro, W.)
Naylor, T. E.
Young, Sir R. (Newton)


Griffiths, G. A. (Hemsworth)
Oliver, G. H.



Griffiths, J. (Llanelly)
Owen, Major G.
TELLERS FOR THE NOES.—




Mr. Mathers and Mr. Charleton.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

6.32 p.m.

Mr. PETHICK-LAWRENCE: We have had a fairly full discussion on the Amend-


ment that was brought forward by my hon. Friend, and I do not think it will be necessary to have any long further discussion on the Resolution. As there are other important matters to be discussed to-night, I hope we may be able to deal with this matter fairly shortly. But I am bound to say I was amazed at the reception which the Chancellor's proposals have been given from the benches of his supporters. A great many hon. Members opposite are keen motorists, and even those who are not themselves motorists must recognise the effect that these proposals will have, not only on the motor industry, but on the other users of the roads, who need improved roads in order to protect the lives of themselves and their children. Really, the motorists have had a very "raw deal" over the Road Fund. As an hon. Member on the Liberal benches has already pointed out, there is no doubt that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George), when the Road Fund was originally established, gave a specific pledge that the Motor Licence Duties and the other taxation would be used for the purpose of improving the roads.
Various changes were made later in the form of the taxation, but after a few years it settled down into a fund derived purely from motor licences. Then the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) made two changes. He had heard a good deal from the motorists to the effect that they thought a tax upon oil might be a better form than the Motor Licence Duties, so he committed upon them the rather grim joke of retaining the Motor Licence Duties and adding Oil Duties as well; and he proceeded to take the Oil Duties, and further to deplete the Road Fund, fed by the Motor Licence Duties, for the purposes of the general Exchequer. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer now proposes finally and definitely to abolish the separate existence of the Road Fund, and to bring the whole entirely under the jurisdiction of the Treasury. Outside this House, associations connected with the motor industry are passing very vigorous resolutions about the Road Fund, local authorities up and down the country are anxious for money to assist them to build and improve the roads, and the Chancellor himself, at the General Election, created the impression that he was going

to extend and enlarge the use of the Road Fund. Now, when he comes forward with a kind of inversion of his promise in the shape of his present proposal, not a Tory dog barks. The only comments that have been made from his own benches consist of the purring approval which he has received from his supporters. Not a single speech has been made from the benches opposite in defence of the Road Fund.
What is the principle which the Chancellor is proposing? He is proposing to abolish definitely the separate earmarked fund, and I am going to say something which no doubt the Chancellor will be very pleased to hear. On principle I have a great deal of sympathy with his attitude in the matter of earmarked funds. The whole system of finance in this country is built up on what one might call the global system, under which we do not have separate funds, but the whole revenue of the country is available for the whole expenditure of the country. Therefore, in principle, I am inclined to agree with the Chancellor. But we have to remember that this is a very special case. It is a special case, first of all, because of the promise that was given by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Carvarvon Boroughs when the fund was originally started. The present Chancellor says that circumstances alter, and you cannot expect promises to live for ever. There may be something in that argument, but the real gravamen of the charge against the right hon. Gentleman in this matter is that we know quite well the purpose of this change of form. It is in order that less money may be spent on the roads, and more money may be available for rearmament; and it is because that is the real purpose of this change of procedure that we are against the Chancellor's proposal.
I have been amazed by the statements that have been made by the right hon. Gentleman himself and hon. Members supporting him. He began by saying that this change would really make very little difference—that there would still be as much money spent on the roads as heretofore. But his supporters, in their anxiety to approve of his action, have gone further than that, and have maintained that, if this change is sanctioned by the House, actually more money will be available in the Road Fund than there was


before. The Chancellor himself has made a new plea, and to some extent, I think, has given the quietus to the view that his proposal was going to make more money available, by the amazing argument that because, with the increase of motors and the increase of roads, there have been more accidents in the country, in some mysterious way it is the increase of roads rather than the increase of motors that has been the cause of these additional tragedies.
The logical conclusion is, not that the Chancellor has been hitherto repressing his urgent desire to spend money on the roads, and therefore is bringing in this new procedure in order, as hon. Members seem to think, that he might more lavishly endow the roads of the country, but that in fact it is very doubtful whether money spent on the roads is worth while at all, and that possibly, if the amount of money spent on the roads were reduced, there might be fewer accidents. That kind of "Alice through the Looking Glass" logic may appeal to hon. Members on the other side of the House, but it certainly does not appeal to us on these benches, and I venture to think it will not appeal to the local authorities, who have a certain amount of common sense on this matter of road building. I think, too, that it will not appeal to the motorists of the country, and still less to the persons who suffer from the accidents which have already been referred to, and which make such a tragic story in our history. That being so, I think there can be very little doubt that this new proposal is likely to do a grave injury to the country, because Chancellors of the Exchequer are driven to take every means at their disposal in order to achieve the purposes which they then have in mind. The present Chancellor has warned us quite clearly that there is going to be a rising expenditure—I think he will agree that I am not overstating his remarks on this occasion—on the defence forces of this country, and that that rising expenditure will probably be met out of revenue. Therefore, we may be quite sure that in the years immediately in front of us the Chancellor of the Exchequer will have a greater and greater temptation to cut off the supply of money for every other purpose, so far as he can do it with satisfaction to him-

self, and at any rate without the definite opposition of this House.
In his speech just now the right hon. Gentleman used what seemed to me to be an entirely fallacious argument. I ventured to interrupt him, but I think the point is so important that I must, put it forcibly and make it quite clear. He said, "After all, what difference does it make? The House has control of the Road Fund to-day, in the sense that it can give or withhold its assent to my raiding the Road Fund. It will still have control under my new scheme, because it will be for the House to decide whether or not we shall spend money on the purposes for which the fund exists." The real distinction, which I ventured to put before the Chancellor, is a perfectly clear one, and we have had an illustration of it only recently in this House. So long as there is a Road Fund which it is the normal business of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to spend in improving the roads of the country, it is only by a positive resolution of this House that he can raid it; but if the money is in the general control of the Treasury, it is not open to the House on its own initiative to move to take the money for the roads; that can only be done on the positive initiative of the Government.
The other day the House clearly expressed its view, with regard to the matter of the Civil Service, that a certain sum of money should be spent in a certain way. The Government said it was not for the House to tell them how to spend the money; the Government alone could decide what money it wanted to spend. The only power the House could have was to refuse to allow them to spend the money in that way. That is precisely the case here. It is not true that the House can compel the Government to spend money on the roads under the new scheme. If the Government wishes to spend the money the House can give or refuse its assent, but it cannot take any initiative whatever in the matter. The Chancellor may say that that is to some extent true even at present. After all, if the Government refused to spend money on the roads out of the Road Fund, the House could not by an initiative Resolution propose to do so. I think the situation is substantially different, because there is money in the Road Fund and the normal thing is that


the Government is expected to spend it and, if it does not, it has to account for it to the House. That is an entirely different situation from that which will arise under the new procedure.
The principle that the right hon. Gentleman proposes to create in this Resolution is a very great danger at this present time. The number of motor cars is increasing with enormous rapidity. That is the reason why this fund is so large. The right hon. Gentleman is trying to take a new means in order that the increase in that money should be diverted from its original purpose. I think the needs of the country and the needs of the roads are such that we should spend the whole of the money in the Road Fund, and this action of the Chancellor in keeping control of it and diverting some of it is against the interests of the country.

6.48 p.m.

Mr. LEWIS: The hon. Gentleman said he was astonished at the reception that this proposal has had from supporters of the Government, and pointed out that some of us are keen on motoring and others are interested in the roads for other reasons. The plain fact of the matter is that this proposal has nothing whatever to do with motoring or with the user of the road for other purposes. It is simply a question whether the money required for the upkeep of the roads should be found in a particular way or not. The question we are asked to discuss is whether it is a good or a bad thing that a specific revenue should be allocated for a specific service. I have always felt that it is a bad principle to earmark particular revenues in this way, for two reasons. First of all, it is most difficult to estimate with any accuracy what the yield of a given source of revenue will be over a period of years, because of changing circumstances. Secondly, it is very difficult to estimte with any accuracy what the need of a given service will be over a series of years, owing to changing circumstances. Therefore, if you earmark a particular source of revenue for a particular service, what happens is that, as time goes on, either the service does not get the sum it requires or else it gets too much. If the money available is not enough for the service there is either an outcry, and other sources of revenue have to be

tapped, or else the service is starved. If the revenue is too great, money is spent on the service which could be better used elsewhere, or else the Chancellor is tempted to raid the fund. In either case the result is equally undesirable.
I have always felt that this arrangement of the Road Fund is a bad one, and I am glad the Chancellor has determined to put an end to it. From the terms of his own speech the hon. Gentleman would be unable to put up a good case against the argument that specific sources of revenue should not be allocated to specific services. He has only been able to attack the proposal at all by drawing the red herring across the Debate that this is in some way an effort to restrict the amount spent on the roads, whereas of course it is nothing of the kind.

6.51 p.m.

Mr. W. ROBERTS: Some of us regard this Resolution with the greatest misgiving for two reasons, that it will probably mean that less is spent upon the roads and that a new form of general taxation will be found which is very undesirable, namely the taxation of distribution. With regard to the first point, whether less will be spent on the roads, and whether that will or will not affect the accident rate, I have been looking up the facts about accidents and expenditure on the roads to see whether the Chancellor's amazing statement can be corroborated. Ten years ago there were 98,000 accidents that affected life or limb. In 1934 that number was 204,000—nearly double. The number of vehicles had similarly practically doubled in the same period, but the amount spent on roads remained almost exactly the same. To put that series of facts in another way, it means that, because to-day we are spending only half as much per vehicle on the roads, the accidents have doubled. You cannot take the gross figure that is being spent. The figure that clearly must affect accidents is the amount that is being spent per head, and that to-day is half what it was, and the accidents are doubled. That entirely disproves the Chancellor's statement as to the relation between the rate of expenditure and accidents.
With regard to my second point, the transport industry is very heavily taxed at present. Of the £72,000,000 that is raised from the tax on petrol, in addition


to the Road Fund proper, the commercial side raises very nearly half. It amounts to an expenditure of practically 2d. a vehicle-mile, which is a very heavy charge indeed on an important branch of the distributive trade. With regard to passengers in omnibuses, I do not know whether it will make them feel less unwell if they realise that out of every shilling that they spend between 2¼d. and 2½d. goes in taxation. Five and a quarter million pounds is being taken this year and, if the present basis of the Road Fund is altered, we shall have less control over the taxation of distribution, which I believe to be a, bad tax. It affects particularly all the country districts and all the smaller towns. It affects the farmer and the dweller in the country more than the town dweller. I believe it is an unjust tax and for these reasons anything that will restrict the control of Parliament and change the basis of this tax from that of being a tax to improve the roads, which is badly needed, to a general tax to raise revenue is thoroughly unsound.
The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) when he first began this policy—he did not dare in those days to go nearly as far as the Chancellor has done—made no disguise of the fact that the question of competitive transport must be considered, and he showed in his Budget speech that he was taking the position of the railways into account. I want to give one figure to show how the taxation of road transport compares with railway transport. A six-ton to seven-ton road waggon pays in licence £55 a year. In petrol it was estimated by the Salter Report that it pays another £133—a total tax of £188. The earning capacity of a 10-ton goods waggon of a railway company is £190 a year, so that road transport is paying in taxation practically the total equivalent of a railway waggon of similar capacity. It illustrates the very unfair incidence of this taxation. Some of us will most certainly vote against the Resolution, because we believe it is the thin end of the wedge which will be used as a ready source of income in the future, and we believe that is highly undesirable.

6.59 p.m.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not think it is necessary to say very much on the

Resolution. The arguments which the hon. Member has just addressed to us are, no doubt, very interesting, but I found some difficulty in relating them to the subject before the House. The hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Pethick-Lawrence) has admitted that in theory there is everything to be said for the plan which I am proposing to follow, and in order to find a reason for opposing in practice what in theory he approves, he has been in some little difficulty. He has found a happy solution of his trouble in the theory that money that should have been spent on the roads will be taken and spent on armaments. Unfortunately for his argument, that idea will not hold water, if I may use that expression, because I have already stated that the programme which happened to be announced during the Election, but had been in preparation long before then, would not in any way be affected. We are pledged to that programme, and whatever happens there will be no derogation from that pledge. On the other hand, I have already intimated to the House that we can see ways and means of financing the armaments programme, but as the programme which I announced in the course of the Election for the roads is a five-year programme, it is quite impossible for money to be taken from the roads for the purpose of armaments.
But a situation might arise where it would be necessary to say whether there should be a further threepence, or perhaps more on the Income Tax, or that other taxation should be increased in order that the money might be spent on the roads. I think it is a monstrous thing to say that the House should not have the power to decide if faced with a possible alternative of that kind that it would prefer to go without additional expenditure on the roads rather than increase taxation, and when any hon. Member comes down to this House and suggests that I have got to make out a case for my proposal I would put it to him that he has got to make out a case for the continuance of the present situation. Why on earth should roads be put in a different position from any other kind of service? The hon. Member says that the needs of the roads are so great that it is necessary to earmark revenue to them contrary to all his cherished theories. Why should more importance


be attached to roads than to other services such as education? The reason why my hon. Friends on this side of the House, who are, as he said, keen motorists and deeply interested in the development of the roads, have taken these proposals calmly and are not alarmed at them is because they realise that the House will have power in the future, if it chooses, to see that money should be allocated to the roads to an adequate degree. If they do not choose to accept the views of the Government on that, they have the alternative, as on any other matter, of turning the Government out. I ask the hon. Gentleman, who laughs at that as ridiculous, why the House should have greater power over one form of service than over another? Until he can answer that question, I submit that my proposal is not only constitutionally right but is a piece of common sense.

Mr. AMMON: The position is not why this service should be treated differently, but why was it arranged to be treated differently?

7.6 p.m.

Mr. HOLDSWORTH: There is an adequate answer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in that the House has control over the service at the present time through the Treasury. I think the Chancellor denied art interruption that there would not be a Road Fund. This House has control over all expenditure, and everybody knows that money cannot be spent out of this fund without the Treasury giving permission, and the Treasury is responsible to the House for that expenditure. There is a very adequate reason why there should be a special arrangement with regard to this particular fund. What industry has a specific tax on it for a specific purpose other than the road industry? The Chancellor of the Exchequer has often suggested in replying to me when I have been speaking about the Petrol Tax that it was a luxury tax. He has never asserted that the licence duties were luxury taxes. When the licence duties were introduced they were introduced so that motorists could contribute for a specific purpose, and the Chancellor of

the Exchequer has not made out any case why that position should be altered. It is perfectly true to say that it may have been necessary to come along to the House and ask for special grants. The case for asking for 3d. on Income Tax does not arise when one thinks that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has taken taken almost the exact amount which 3d. in Income Tax would bring in in his two raids on the Road Fund. Taking them with the raid which the right hon. Member for Epping (Mr. Churchill) made, there would have been no need to ask for a special increase of 3d. on the Income Tax, if those amounts had been left in the Road Fund. There will be a Road Fund, it is true, when this comes into force, but it will be possible for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to say, "I cannot afford this money this year; the roads will have to be left for the time being." Whereas it is far more difficult for him to make that assertion when we know that there is a specific fund. It is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to justify why he asks for a change, and he has done nothing of the kind.

7.9 p.m.

Mr. G. STRAUSS: I would like to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer this one question. At the moment there is published annually a very full report of the Road Fund account—the amount which comes in and what is paid out—in considerable detail. Under this new arrangement will there be as full an account published as is published at the moment?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I can only answer by leave of the House, but I should imagine not, The account to which the hon. Member refers was in order to allow the House to preserve some measure of control over the expenditure of the Road Fund. Now, it will be able to control it in the usual way.

Question put, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

The House divided: Ayes, 236; Noes, 123.

Division No. 154.]
AYES.
[7.10 p.m.


Acland-Troyte, Lt.-Col, G. J.
Alien, Lt.-Col. J. Sandeman (B'kn'hd)
Assheton, R.


Adams, S. V. T. (Leeds, W.)
Amery, Rt. Hon. L. C. M. S.
Baldwin, Rt. Hon. Stanley


Agnew, Lieut.-Comdr. P. G.
Anstruther-Gray, W. J.
Beaumont, Hon. R. E. B. (Portsm'k)


Albery, I. J.
Aske, Sir R. W.
Beit, Sir A. L.




Bernays, R. H.
Gridley, Sir A. B.
Palmer, G. E. H.


Birchall, Sir J. D.
Grimston, R. V.
Patrick, C. M.


Blair, Sir R.
Guinness, T. L. E. B.
Peake, O.


Blindell, Sir J.
Guns ton, Capt. D. W.
Peat, C. U.


Bottom, A. C.
Guy. J. C. M.
Petherick, M.


Boulton, W. W.
Hacking, Rt. Hon. D. H.
Pickthorn, K. W. M.


Bowater, Col, Sir T. Vansittart
Hamilton, Sir G. C.
Pllkington, R.


Bowyer, Capt. Sir G. E. W.
Hanbury, Sir C.
Pownall, Sir Assheton


Boyce, H. Leslie
Hannah, I. C.
Radford, E. A.


Briscoe, Capt. R. G.
Harbord, A.
Ralkes, H. V. A. M.


Brocklebank, C. E. R.
Hartington, Marquess of
Ramsbotham, H.


Brown, Brig.-Gen. H. C. (Newbury)
Harvey, G.
Ramsden. Sir E.


Browne, A. C. (Belfast, W.)
Haslam, Sir J (Bolton)
Rathbone, J. R. (Bodmin)


Bull, B. B.
Heilgers, Captain F. F. A.
Rayner, Major R. H.


Burton, Col. H. W.
Heneage, Lieut.-Colonel A. P.
Reed, A. C. (Exeter)


Butler, R. A.
Hepworth, J.
Reid, Sir D. D. (Down)


Campbell, Sir E. T.
Herbert, Major J. A. (Monmouth)
Reid, W. Allan (Derby)


Cartland, J. R. H.
Herbert, Captain S. (Abbey)
Rlckards, G. W. (Skipton)


Cary, R. A.
Hills, Major Rt. Hon. J. W. (Ripon)
Ross Taylor, W. (Woodbridge)


Cazalet, Capt. V. A. (Chippenham)
Holmes, J. S.
Rowlands, G.


Chamberlain, Rt. Hn. N. (Edgb't'n)
Hope, Captain Hon. A. O. J.
Ruggles-Brise, Colonel S: E. A.


Channon, H.
Hopkinson, A.
Runciman. Rt. Hon. W.


Chapman, A. (Rutherglen)
Horsbrugn, Florence
Russell, A. West (Tynemouth)


Choriton, A. E. L.
Howitt, Dr. A. B.
Russell, R. J. (Eddisbury)


Clarke, F. E.
Hudson, Capt. A. U. M. (Hack., N.)
Russell, S. H. M. (Darwen)


Clarry, Sir Reginald
Hudson, R. S. (Southport)
Salt, E. W.


Collins, Rt. Hon. Sir G. P
Hunter, T.
Samuel, Sir A. M. (Farnham)


Colville, Lt.-Col. D. J.
Hurd, Sir P. A.
Sandys, E. D.


Cook, T. R. A. M. (Norfolk, N.)
Jackson, Sir H.
Savery, Servington


Cooke, J. D. (Hammersmith, S.)
James, Wing-Commander A. W.
Scott, Lord William


Cooper, Rt. Hon. T. M. (E'nburgh, W.)
Jones, Sir G. W. H. (S'k N'w'gt'n)
Selley, H. R.


Courthope, Col. Sir G. L.
Keeling, E. H.
Shaw, Major P. S. (Wavertree)


Craddock, Sir R. H.
Lamb, Sir J. Q.
Shepperson, Sir E. W.


Croft, Brig.-Gen. Sir H. Page
Lambert, Rt. Hon. G.
Simmonds, O. E.


Crookshank, Capt. H. F. C.
Latham, Sir P.
Simon, Rt. Hon. Sir J. A.


Groom-Johnson, R. P.
Leckle, J. A.
Sinclair, Col. T. (Queen's U. B'lfst),


Crossley, A. C.
Leech, Dr. J. W.
Smiles, Lieut.-Colonel Sir W. D.


Cruddas, Col. B.
Lelghton, Major B. E. P.
Smith, L. W. (Hallam)


Davidson, Rt. Hon. Sir J. C. C.
Levy, T.
Smith, Sir R. W. (Aberdeen)


Davies, C. (Montgomery)
Lewis, O.
Somerset, T.


Davies, Major G. F. (Yeovil)
Lindsay, K. M.
Somervell sir D. B. (Crewe)


Davison, Sir W. H.
Llewellin, Lieut.-Col. J. J.
Somervllie, A. A. (Windsor)


Dawson, Sir P.
Lloyd, G. W.
Southby, Comdr. A. R. J.


Denman, Hon. R. D.
Lottus, P. C.
Spears, Brig. -Gen. E. L.


Dospencer-Robertson, Major J. A. F.
Lovat-Fraser, J. A.
Spens, W. P.


Dorman-Smith, Major R. H.
Lumley, Capt. L. R.
Stewart. J. Henderson (Fife, E.)


Dower, Capt. A. V. G.
Mabane, W. (Huddersfield)
Storey. S.


Drewe, C.
MacAndrew, Lt.-Col. Sir C. G.
Stourton. Hon. J. J.


Duckworth, G. A. V. (Salop)
M'Connell, Sir J.
Strauss, E. A. (Southwark, N.)


Duckworth. W. R. (Moss Side)
McCorquodale, M. S.
Strauss, H. C. (Norwich)


Dugdale, Major T. L.
Macdonald, Capt. P. (Isle of Wright)
Strickland, Captain W. F.


Duggan, H. J.
McEwen, Capt. J. H. F.
Stuart, Lord C. Crichton- (N'thw'h)


Duncan, J. A. L.
McKle, J. H.
Stuart, Hon. J. (Moray and Nairn)


Dunglass, Lord
Maclay, Hon. J. p.
Sutclife, H.


Dunne, P. R. R.
Macmillan, H. (Stockton-on-Tees)
Taylor, Vice-Adm. E. A. (Padd., SO


Eastwood, J. F.
Magnay, T.
Thomas, J. P. L. (Hereford)


Eckersley, P. T.
Makins, Brig. -Gen. E.
Thomson. Sir J. D. W.


Edmondson. Major Sir J.
Manningham-Buller, Sir M.
Titchfield. Marquess of


Elliston, G. S.
Margesson, Capt. Rt. Hon. H. D. R.
Tree, A. R. L. F.


Emery, J. F.
Maxwell, S. A.
Tryon, Major- Rt. Hon. G. C.


Emrys-Evans, P. V.
Mayhew, Lt.-Col. J
Tufnell, Lieut. -Com. R. L.


Entwistle, C. F.
Mellor, Sir J. S. P. (Tamworth)
Turton, R. H.


Erskine Hill, A. G.
Mills, Sir F. (Leyton, E.)
Wakefield W. W.


Evans, Capt. A. (Cardiff, S.)
Mills, Major J. D. (New Forest)
Ward, Lieut.-Col. Sir A. L. (Hull)


Everard, W. L.
Mitchell, H. (Brentford and Chiswick)
Waterhouse, Captain C.


Fox, Sir G. W. G.
Morelng, A. C.
Wedderburn, H. J. S.


Fremantle, Sir F. E.
Morgan, R. H.
Wells, S. R.


Furness, S. N.
Morrison, G. A. (Scottish Univ's.)
Wickham. Lt-Col. E. T. R.


Fyfe, D. P. M.
Morrison, W. S. (Cirencester)
Williams H. G. (Croydon, S.)


Ganzoni, Sir J.
Mulrhead, Lt-Col. A. J.
Wilson, Lt.-Col. Sir A. T. (Hitchin)


Gledhill, G.
Munro, P.
Womersley. Sir W. J.


Gluckstein, L. H.
Neven-Spence, Maj. B. H. H.
Young, A. S. L. (Partick)


Goidle, N. B.
Nicolson, Hon. H. G.



Gower, Sir R. V.
O'Neill, Major Rt. Hon. Sir Hugh
TELLERS FOR THE AYES —


Graham Captain A. C. (Wirral)
Ormsby-Gore, Rt, Hon. W. G.
Dr. Morris-Jones and Mr. Cross.


Grattan-Doyle, Sir N.
Orr-Ewlng, I. L.





NOES.


Acland, Rt. Hon. Sir F. Dyke
Barnes, A. J.
Brown, Rt. Hon. J. (S. Ayrshire)


Adams, D. (Consett)
Barr, J.
Buchanan, G.


Adams, D. M. (Poplar, S.)
Ballenger, F.
Burke, W. A.


Adamson, W. M.
Benson, G.
Cape, T.


Ammon, C. G.
Bevan, A.
Cassells, T.


Attlee, Rt. Hon. C. R.
Brooke, W.
Chater, D.







Cluse, W. S.
Jones, A. C. (Shipley)
Ritson, J.


Cocks, F. S
Jones, H. Haydn (Merioneth)
Roberts, Rt. Hon. F. O. (W. Brom.)


Compton, J.
Kelly, W. T.
Roberts, W. (Cumberland, N.)


Cove, W. G.
Kennedy, Rt. Hon. T.
Rowson, G.


Cripps, Hon. Sir Stafford
Kirby, B. V.
Seely, Sir H. M.


Daggar, G.
Kirkwood, D.
Sexton, T. M.


Davidson, J. J. (Maryhill)
Lathan, G.
Shinwell, E.


Davies, R. J. (Westhoughton)
Lawson, J. J.
Short, A.


Day, H.
Leach, W.
Silverman, S. S.


Dunn, E. (Rother Valley)
Lee, F.
Simpson, F. B.


Ede J. C.
Leonard, W.
Sinclair, Rt. Hon. Sir A. (C'thn's)


Edwards, Sir C. (Bedwelity)
Leslie, J. R.
Smith, Ben (Rotherhlthe)


Fletcher, Lt.-Comdr. R. T. H.
Logan, D. G.
Smith, E. (Stoke)


Foot, D. M.
Lunn, W.
Sorensen, R. W.


Frankel, D.
Macdonald, G. (Ince)
Stephen, C.


George, Major G. Lloyd (Pembroke)
McGhee, H. G.
Stewart, W. J. (H'ght`n-le-Sp'ng)


Gibbins, J.
McGovern, J.
Strauss, G. R. (Lambeth, N.)


Graham, D. M. (Hamilton)
MacLaren, A.
Taylor, R. J. (Morpeth)


Greenwood, Rt. Hon. A.
Maclean, N.
Thurtie, E.


Griffith, F. Kingsley (M'ddl'sbro, W.)
MacNeill, Weir, L.
Tinker, J. J.


Griffiths, G. A. (Hemsworth)
Mainwaring, W. H.
Viant, S. P.


Griffiths, J. (Llanelly)
Markiew, E.
Waikden, A. G.


Hall, G. H. (Aberdare)
Marshall, F.
Watkins, F. C.


Hall, J. H. (Whitechapel)
Mathers, G.
Watson, W. McL.


Hardie, G. D.
Messer, F.
Welsh, J. C.


Harris, Sir P. A.
Milner, Major. J.
Westwood, J.


Henderson, A. (Kingswinford)
Montague, F.
White, H. Graham


Henderson, T. (Tradeston)
Oliver, G. H.
Wilkinson, Ellen


Holdsworth, H.
Owen, Major G.
Williams, E. J. (Ogrnore)


Holland, A.
Paling, W.
Wilson, C. H. (Attercliffe)


Hollins, A.
Parker, H. J. H.
Windsor, W. (Hull, C.)


Jagger, J.
Parkinson, J. A.
Woods, G. S. (Finsbury)


Jenkins, A. (Pontypool)
Pethick-Lawrence, F. W.
Young, Sir R. (Newton)


Jenkins, Sir W. (Neath)
Potts, J.



John, W.
Price, M. P.
TELLERS FOR THE NOES. —


Johnston, Rt. Hon, T.
Pritt, D. N.
Mr. Charleton and Mr. Whiteley.


Resolution agreed to.

Orders of the Day — FINANCE [POST OFFICE FUND].

Resolution reported:
That—

(a)for the purpose of any calculation required to be made in connection with the Post Office Fund as respects the current financial year, the fixed contribution to the Exchequer shall be taken to be the sum of ten million seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds;
(b)it is expedient to make provision for the payment in advance to the Post Office Fund out of the Consolidated Fund during any financial year of such amounts as the Treasury think fit on account of the sum which it is estimated will become payable to the Post Office Fund in respect of that financial year."


Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

7.20 p.m.

Mr. BENSON: I shall be glad if the Chancellor of the Exchequer will give an explanation of what the Resolution really involves, and why it is necessary. It is a breach of an important constitutional point that out of the Consolidated Fund any sum shall be paid which has not been definitely ascertained, and no sum should be paid save on the certificate of the Auditor and Accountant-General, who is an officer of this House and not of the Government. The Resolution, as drafted, suggests that payment

shall be made at the instance of the Treasury and of the amount which the Treasury considers fit, not for a sum definitely ascertained or certified but before the sum can be ascertained and certified, and at the instance of the Treasury, and I hope that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be able to give a defence of this proposed breach with the constitutional practice.

7.22 p.m.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not think that that question really arises upon this very harmless Resolution. The Resolution is in two parts. The first part merely fixes the contribution for another year, and the second part, which is the one which the hon. Gentleman has described, is merely a device intended, as I explained in my Budget speech, to simplify and accelerate the present procedure. What happens at present is that the receipts from the Post Office come into the Exchequer and a fixed sum is retained. The remainder goes back to the Post Office Fund for the purposes of carrying out developments of Post Office work. There are some minor adjustments, but on broad principles that is what happens. The amount which has to go back—that is, the surplus—to the Post Office Fund at present, is made only in one payment on


1st November in the year following the end of the financial year in which the surplus accrues.
The result of that may be some considerable confusion in the accounts, because it might happen that in the course of the financial year the. Postmaster-General might give away a considerable part of his revenue in concessions on charges or otherwise. That, of course, would reduce the gross receipts in that year. It would also reduce the amount which has to go to the Post Office Fund, but, as the hon. Member will see, that would not take place until the following year instead of in the same year that the reduction of receipts had taken place. Although that is not happening now and the amounts in question are very small, it is conceivable that that might be an awkward matter. Therefore the effect of the provision which is covered by this Resolution is that the amount of the sum which would go to the Post Office Fund is in no way changed. It merely gives the Treasury power to authorise payment to the Post Office Fund within the year the surplus arises, instead of in the following year as is the case at the present time. It can only be for the amount of the surplus.

Mr. BENSON: I take it that the surplus must be ascertained and that the payment out will be before the surplus has been correctly ascertained? It will be an estimated amount, and it is in regard to that matter that the change of constitutional procedure arises.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I do not think that question arises.

Orders of the Day — WAYS AND MEANS.

REPORT (23RD APRIL).

Resolution reported:

AMENDMENT OF LAW.

"That it is expedient to amend the law relating to National Debt, Customs, and Inland Revenue (including Excise), and to make further provision in connection with Finance."

Bill ordered to be brought in upon the said Resolutions and upon the Resolutions

reported from the Committee of Ways and Means upon the 27th day of April, and agreed to by the House on that day, by the Chairman of Ways and Means, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. W. S. Morrison.

FINANCE BILL,

"to grant certain duties of Customs and Inland Revenue (including Excise), to alter other duties, and to amend the law relating to Customs and Inland Revenue (including Excise) and the National Debt, and to make further provision in connection with Finance," presented accordingly, and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Monday next, and to be printed. [Bill 90.]

SPECIAL AREAS RECONSTRUCTION (AGREEMENT) [MONEY].

Resolution reported:
That it is expedient—

I. To authorise the Treasury to make, with a company (hereinafter referred to as 'the company') to be established with the object (among other objects) of providing as a temporary and special expedient a means of affording financial facilities to persons setting up or carrying on business in the areas specified in the First Schedule to the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act, 1934, who satisfy the company that whilst having reasonable expectation of ultimate success on an economic basis they are not for the time being in a position to obtain financial facilities from banks or financial institutions primarily engaged in providing financial facilities for long or medium term periods, an agreement providing for the following among other matters, namely—

(a) the payment by the Treasury of the preliminary expenses of the company and of the costs and expenses of and incidental to the winding up of the company;
(b) the payment by the Treasury to the company in every year of the amount expended by the company in administration expenses in that year or of a contribution of twenty thousand pounds in respect of such expenses, whichever is the less
(c) the setting aside by the company of reserves against losses, and the payment by the Treasury as a contribution to those reserves of sums equal to the amounts from time to time lent by the company up to a limit of one hundred thousand pounds;


(d) the payment by the Treasury to the company upon the winding up of the company—

(i) in respect of the first million pounds lent by the company (hereinafter referred to as 'the company's first loans'); and
(ii) in respect of any amount lent by the company in addition to the company's first loans (hereinafter referred to as 'the company's additional loans');

of sums equal to the amount, if any, by which the losses of capital attributable respectively to the company's first loans or to the company's additional loans (as the case may be) exceed the amount of the reserves mentioned in sub-paragraph (c) of this paragraph which is available to meet those losses so, however, that the sum payable by the Treasury under this paragraph in respect of the company's first loans and the sum so payable in respect of the company's additional loans shall neither of them exceed twenty-five per cent. of the amount of the loans in respect of which it is payable;
(e) the payment to the Treasury upon the winding up of the company by way of refund of the sums paid by the Treasury in accordance with sub-paragraph (c) of this paragraph of a sum not exceeding one hundred thousand pounds out of the amount, if any, by which the assets of the company remaining after the discharge of the liabilities of the company exceed the paid-up share capital of the company;


II. To authorise the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament of the sums to be paid annually by the Treasury under the said agreement in respect of the company's administration expenses, the issue out of the Consolidated Fund of any sums required for making any of the other payments aforesaid to he made by the Treasury under the said agreement, and the payment into the Exchequer of any payments to be made to the Treasury thereunder:
III. To make certain provisions ancillary to the matters aforesaid."

Mr. SPEAKER: I do not propose to take either of the Amendments on the Paper in the name of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Mabane)—in line 2, leave out "with," and insert "an agreement with and provide certain moneys for"; and in line 7, leave out from "1934," to end of Resolution.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution."

7.29 p.m.

Mr. SHINWELL: It is by no means a flattering testimony to the financial

virtues of the Chancellor of the Exchequer or to the achievements of the Government that, after five successive Budgets and the restoration of what is called national prosperity, we should be discussing a proposal affecting distressed areas once more. In spite of the applause, the handshaking, the mutual admiration and the substitution of confidence for the crisis of 1931, the inescapable fact remains, that the problem of the distressed areas seems to persist. It is, in the judgment of my hon. Friends behind me, a reproach to our national life, a standing challenge to the whole nation and a severe condemnation of the Government and all its works. Of all the pettifogging, miserable, piffling and futile proposals that have ever come before this House this is the least effective, both in its intentions and in substance. It can bring no substantial relief to the people in the depressed areas. It cannot remove the despair that overwhelms Durham, South Wales, Cumberland and many parts of Scotland. It cannot deal with the problem of unemployment. It neither touches the roots nor the fringe of the problem. When the Government outlined their plans in the earlier part of the Session we were promised substantial measures of assistance. Thereby, the hopes of the people in the distressed areas were raised. Now, after this prolonged period of gestation, and after an infinity of travail and straining, this is the best that the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Government produce. We now see what reliance we can place on the Government's promises.
Strange as it may seem, there will be many people in the distressed areas who will welcome this proposal. The plight of the people is so tragic that they are glad to accept almost anything. They are like drowning men clutching at straws, ready to cling to anything that offers the slightest relief. I venture to make the position of my hon. Friends beside me abundantly clear. We object in principle to the provision of public money for the purpose of bolstering up private enterprise, but in the pathetic circumstances with which we are confronted in the areas we represent we are ready to set aside our principles and to throw overboard the convictions upon which we have so long relied, in order to try out any measure which can re-


establish the normal life of those areas. But we must be satisfied that whatever scheme is presented to the House on behalf of the depressed areas it must be of substantial value. Therefore, we avail ourselves of this opportunity to expose the futilities of the Government's policy and to lay bare the inadequacy of the proposals, while at the same time seeking for enlightenment.
Within the Rules of the House we are precluded from discussing all the issues affecting the distressed areas. Obviously, before we can assess the value of the scheme now under discussion we must consider the disease for which the remedy is prescribed. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget statement, and in particular in his broadcast utterance, talked at large of the recurrence of prosperity. Of course, there is prosperity in the country. There is prosperity to be found even in the distressed areas, but in the main there is unexampled distress, malnutrition of a serious character, the lowering of the physique of men, women and children, and in particular the steady decline of the coal trade, which is the main source of livelihood in those areas. Moreover, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has boasted of the decline in unemployment attributable, as he alleged, to the progressive programme of the Government in the last five years. He declared that unemployment has now declined to the level of a little above 14 per cent., but in Durham it is 34 per cent., in South Wales about the same, and in Scotland as a whole, good and bad, it is 28 per cent. But that is not the worst part of this tragic story. In Jarrow it is 70 per cent., in spite of the social service efforts that have been contributed by well-meaning people; in Bishop Auckland it is 52 per cent., and in some parts of Glamorgan 60 per cent.
Does the Chancellor of the Exchequer seriously suggest that this niggling, footling proposal is capable of dealing with such a situation? In the second speech that he made in the Budget Debate he complained petulently, even lugubriously, of the response which this proposal had evoked. He deplored the absence of a cordial response. What does he expect from us? Does he expect that we should go down on our hands and knees and worship at the shrine and that

we should pay tribute to his sentiments and his financial policy for a scheme of this character? We thank him, but we thank him for nothing if this is all that he can offer. We are not disposed at this or any other time to go down on our hands and knees and offer the right hon. Gentleman the tribute which he expected would result from the submission of this proposal.
Recently, we had several reports presented by the Commissioners for the respective distressed areas. May I refer very briefly to an observation for which Mr. Malcolm Stewart was responsible. He said in his first report, dealing with the possibility of absorbing a large volume of the unemployed through the expenditure of public money:
It may, therefore, be estimated that to reduce unemployment by 50,000 in the Special Areas for the period of the Commissioner's appointment would involve an expenditure of the order of £35,000,000.
Let it be noted that £35,000,000, in the opinion of an expert, is capable of dealing with 50,000 unemployed, and that only for a short period, and yet £1,000,000 is what the right hon. Gentleman has to offer as a means of partially solving the problem of unemployment and distress that affects the areas with which we are now dealing. Obviously, if £35,000,000 is essential to deal with 50,000 unemployed, £1,000,000—if, indeed, it he £1,000,000, and I shall have something to say about that a little later—is clearly incapable of coming within a thousand miles of this problem.
It is proposed under the scheme, as I understand it, to create small business undertakings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer declared the other night that a demand of this kind had been made in several quarters. May I ask whether there are not plenty of these small undertakings already? In point of fact they are struggling for existence. They have the greatest difficulty in making both ends meet and in finding the necessary resources to compete with the larger business undertakings. The tendency in modern industrial times is not to create small business undertakings, but it has been in the reverse direction. It is the larger business undertakings which can thrive and flourish even in times of depression, when the smaller business undertakings go out of existence. Therefore, it is extremely doubtful whether it


is desirable to promote and carry through a scheme which will perpetuate an evil and create business undertakings which in three or four years, certainly before this scheme has been properly wound up, will have gone headlong into bankruptcy.
I want to put to the Chancellor of the Exchequer a few questions on the main elements of the proposal. I inquire, quite properly in the circumstances, what is to be the nature of these undertakings. There is not a single line in the Resolution, and not a single word was uttered in the Budget Debate by the right hon. Gentleman or the Financial Secretary, which gives the least clue as to the precise character of the contemplated undertakings. Has the right hon. Gentleman any ideas to lay before us? Are these undertakings to be productive or distributive in character? Presumably, they are to be productive. What are the productive elements with which they are to he called upon to deal? What are they to produce? Before a scheme of this kind can be acceptable to the depressed areas or to this House we should be furnished with a clear and precise explanation of the nature, the form, and the substance of the contemplated industrial undertakings. We ask for some assurance on that head, because we desire to know whether there is the least likelihood that these industrial undertakings will prosper, and whether in the circumstances of the depressed areas, with reduced purchasing power, which is perhaps the most pregnant problem of all, there is any need for a multiplicity of small business undertakings. Unless we can have an assurance on these heads it would be wise for the House to reject this scheme and ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer for alternative proposals which would enable the £1,000,000, or whatever sum may be necessary, to be spent in a direct fashion by increasing the purchasing power of the community in the distressed areas.
Now I turn to the actual proposal before the House in order to ascertain what is intended. I feel that hon. Members will agree that the scheme as it appears in the Resolution is somewhat involved. I propose, in a humble and modest fashion, to see if we can make the scheme appear less obscure. There is, as I understand it, a company to be created

and that company is to consist, presumably, of a number of directors. As to who the directors are to be and as to how they are to be appointed we are left completely in the dark. I think we are entitled to some enlightenment on those matters. It is exceedingly important that we should have information as to the calibre of the directorate, and some indication as to who is to be responsible for their appointment and dismissal if it be necessary at any time. Three main propositions are involved. The first is a proposal to provide a maximum of £20,000 for the company in connection with contemplated administrative expenses. The second proposal is that up to £100,000 is to be provided by the Treasury, in addition to the £20,000 for administration expenses, towards reserves, which are to be repaid to the Treasury on the winding-up of the company. The third main element in the scheme is a guarantee of 25 per cent. by the Treasury of the amount of losses on, loans made by the company in excess of the reserves at its disposal.
It will be noted that apart from the, £20,000 for administration expenses and. £100,000 from the Treasury towards the reserves of the company against possible losses, there is to be no further provision by the Treasury. That is a very remarkable feature of the scheme. It is true that there is a contemplated expenditure by the Treasury, apart from the items I have mentioned, of £1,000,000. The right hon. Gentleman in his Budget speech said that the Treasury cannot lose more than £1,000,000, but it will be noted that the money contributed by the Treasury towards the reserves and the £1,000,000 which are in part guaranteed are to be repaid to the Treasury on the winding-up of the company. Where is the initial capital of the company to come from? The company cannot commence operations without capital. Is it to come from the Treasury? If it is, in which part of the Resolution does it appear? On the other hand, can it be—and this I think is a more likely contingency—that the company, backed by a, Government guarantee of 25 per cent. of possible losses, will approach financial institutions and obtain from them the initial capital upon which these business undertakings are to be based? That seems to be more likely than that there will be any initial and substantial outlay by the Treasury itself. But, clearly, if that be the case—the right


hon. Gentleman will correct me if I am wrong—why should it be necessary for the banks to require a 25 per cent. guarantee?
Take a likely example if the scheme goes through. The right hon. Gentleman provides, although this is not contained in the actual Resolution a reference was made to it in the Budget speech, that the maximum loan shall be £10,000 provided by the Treasury. Let us assume that that is a 25 per cent. guarantee. Then these business undertakings will require an initial capital of £40,000, and £30,000 must be raised by the companies on behalf of these undertakings through some financial institution. The financial institution will obviously require security. They will require collateral security. Surely the right hon. Gentleman does not seriously suggest that a financial institution will require a 25 per cent. guarantee from the Treasury for a company or a business undertaking which is able to provide collateral for 75 per cent.? At all events it is passing strange and not at all consistent with the usual and normal operations of financial institutions. On this point we require a good deal of enlightenment.
Now I come to the substance of the proposal itself. Let us assume that the whole £1,000,000 of guarantee to be provided is absorbed, although it is not certain that it will be. First of all, the company has to be created and the needs of the situation must be ascertained. The men have to come in and make applications. These applications have to be examined and approved. It will take some time before they can get going, if they ever get going at all. But is it likely that the whole £1,000,000 of guarantee will be absorbed? Assuming that it is—let us make the best of this bad job—then it represents a total expenditure of £4,000,000. Is it suggested that £4,000,000 can deal adequately with the situation in South Wales or in Durham, in the depressed parts of Scotland and in Cumberland? Surely the right hon. Gentleman does not mean that, unless we are to assume that it is £40,000,000 not £4,000,000, a sum more consistent with the needs of the case? But if that is intended perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will point out in which part of the Resolution or in his Budget Speech that reference appears?
I want to ask further questions. Will local authorities have any control over the operations of this company? The right hon. Gentleman appeared to indicate in his original speech that this might be the case. If it is, we ought to have some information as to the exact relationship between the company and local authorities. Will local authorities be asked for their advice or assistance? Will they have any measure of control over the operations These are questions which are worthy of an adequate reply. Is there any estimate in the Treasury as to the number likely to be employed through the scheme? How many men or women, or youths or girls, does the right hon. Gentleman expect will be absorbed as a result of the schemes? Reference was made in the Budget to the operations of the company for the production of oil from coal. I am not going to embark on that subject now, but I understand that the venture cost something in the region of £4,000,000 and employs something like 1,200 men. As it uses about 350,000 tons of coal per annum it gives employment, on the assumption that new workpeople are employed, to something like 1,500 miners. If a scheme which costs £4,000,000 only provides employment for these few men, what is this scheme likely to do? If the right hon. Gentleman submits this scheme for our approval he should back it up by a submission that it will provide something in the nature of adequate employment.
What is to be the rate of interest on the loan? The Treasury have to approve the loans or will have some control over the loans furnished by financial institutions. What is to be the rate of interest? We are entitled to be told this, because clearly the rate of interest is a substantial item in the working costs of these contemplated undertakings. How long is it to be before the scheme operates? That is the essence of the case. It may be thought that I have spoken with some acerbity. Let me assure hon. Members that I am not in the least animated by any feeling of personal antagonism towards the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I speak, as so many of my colleagues do, with, intensity of feeling. I go to my division now and again and I never return without a sense of worry and despair, sometimes—hon. Members may believe it or not—almost broken-hearted at the


stories told to me. It is a painful and agonising experience for many hon. Members to visit their divisions. We dislike the situation intensely, and if we speak with feeling on these matters it is inevitable; it cannot be otherwise, and it is because we are keenly desirous of obtaining a speedy solution of this problem, or even a modest modicum of relief which would bring comfort to the people we represent.
I submit that I have not asked too many questions, nor have I exaggerated the situation in the slightest. But if it be alleged that I have committed any misdemeanour in this regard, my excuse is that this proposal seems to be the end of the Government's tether in relation to schemes on behalf of the distressed areas. We have had two Special Commissioner's reports, we have had social service schemes, we have had the efforts of well-intentioned people, men and women alike, we have had confidence and prosperity, we have had all these presumably glorious Budgets presented to us in recent years, we are told there is a decline in unemployment—all good things —and this seems to be the final effort on the part of the Government. They are at the end of their tether, and they have nothing more to offer. That, therefore, is our excuse for raising this Debate and for the observations which I have ventured to make, and upon the answer to the submissions which I have made depends our attitude.
Before I conclude, may I direct the attention of hon. Members to newspaper reports of two speeches delivered in the past few days? The first is a speech for which no Member of this party is responsible, a speech delivered by Sir Benjamin Dawson, Chairman of the Bradford Central Division Conservative Association, a man, presumably, of repute, a man whose word can be relied upon, a man whose utterances count for something, no mere Labour agitator, no wild, tearing, raging revolutionary, but a man of substance, a man who counts in the circles of the Conservative party. Hear what this estimable gentleman has to say of the Government. He was speaking of his experiences in the distressed areas, and he said:
The pigs on my farm are better housed and fed than some of the people I saw that day.

That is how it strikes the decent, observant, and discerning mind. Many of us have been a little hardened, although our feelings creep out now and again, but here is someone who is struck by the extraordinary phenomenon which presents itself in these areas. He proceeds:
The cause of these terrible conditions is poverty, and poverty arises from unemployment.
That is an observation which is very familiar to hon. Members on these benches. He goes on:
There is a cure, and a simple one, but it is not applied because we in this country are steeped in greed and selfishness.
To whom are those words directed? Not at us of the Labour party, but at the Government, because he proceeds:
The cure for unemployment is to reduce the working hours. To keep up the standard of living, there must be no reduction of wages.
Then, as regards the Government, he observes:
The Government has done nothing towards a permanent reduction of this distress. It has deliberately thrown cold water on a scheme which would eventually have borne fruit. I refer to the 40-hour week, which was considered by 52 nations at Geneva.
I hope the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour will take note of that, because it affects his Department. That is how this gentleman speaks of His Majesty's Government. Can it be wondered at that we are a little more crude in our methods and use the language that we do and speak with such intensity of feeling?
Now I will refer to a still more pregnant utterance. A speech was made by Lord Barnard in Durham. I have no acquaintance with the gentleman, nor am I familiar with his politics, if indeed he has any. Lord Barnard said:
I believe we will get no Government to listen to us unless we do adopt Clydeside methods. The plight of the industry—
Presumably he meant the coal industry or possibly allied industries:
and of the people in this area is nothing new. It has been going on now for 10 years, during which the Government has had reports from two commissioners and many suggestions from other sources. These have never been acted on to any extent.
Will the Financial Secretary to the Treasury please note?


I think it is up to the Government to take action, but unless we directly challenge them to do something, or accuse them of funking the problem in a rather brutal manner, I do not think we shall have much success.
Revolution in exclusive circles! Perhaps the Noble Lord was right. Perhaps it may be necessary for some of us to take a leaf out of his book. Perhaps it may be necessary in due course, much as we deplore it, to depart slightly from constitutional methods, to be a little less moderate and restrained. It may be that our people in the distressed areas are too subdued. When the Noble Lord speaks of Clydeside methods, what has he in mind? Not the constitutional process of building up, in a democratic fashion, step by step, each brick well and truly laid. No — something extra constitutional, something which may be revolutionary; otherwise, what did he mean by his reference to Clydeside methods?
I have some acquaintance with Clydeside methods, and, therefore, unless we can obtain from the Government unhappily in power, maybe to be in power for some considerable time ahead, some assurance that the claims of the people in the distressed areas will be adequately met, some indication that the hopes held out at the beginning of the Session will be fulfilled, unless there is some implementation of those promises, it may be necessary to create—and I put it no higher than this—a spirit of revolt in the distressed areas, to bring the Government, and for that matter the whole nation, to a conscious realisation of the issues involved, to make the nation face up to the inescapable fact that in spite of all the talk of progress this tragic problem still persists. But there is no possibility of a remedy so long as the Government produce these trifling and futile proposals. Therefore, while we have not yet decided what our action is to be at the end of this Debate, we, in spite of to-night's proceedings, will go on demanding from the Government from time to time more and more schemes of an adequate character to deal with this situation. We shall not rest content, and -we shall go to our depressed constituents, and we shall call upon them to fortify us in our efforts in this Assembly.

8.10 p.m.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: I am not going to embark upon this discussion in any

polemical spirit in the observations that I shall address to the House. The subject of unemployment is too sad for us to deal with except in a sympathetic and constructive way. The hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Shiawell), who has just sat down, seemed to divide his speech into three portions. In the first portion he was scolding us for allowing, if not causing, the distress in these areas, or at any rate that we were responsible for the continuation of the trouble. I am not going to deal with that aspect of the matter. I dealt with it at some length about two months ago in a Ministry of Labour Vote Debate in this House. The other part of the hon. Member's speech with which I will deal, though briefly, was about the financial machinery in the Resolution. He asked how the money was to be provided for this proposal. I have no knowledge of what the Treasury will do. But as I had to operate the Government's Export Credits scheme started some years ago, I may say that we had an amount of credit or Government backing given to us with which to put the scheme into operation, and we did it very successfully. There was no providing of capital or Actual money. The Government lent its credit to traders who wanted the money for liquidating their customers' bills and they got it at small cost. In other words, with the Government's backing, the Government's signature, traders were able to raise the money for their sold goods from bankers at Treasury bill rates. I presume, although I have no authority for saying it, that this may be the answer to the hon. Member, that in some way the finance will be provided for this present scheme by use of the Government's guarantee. That would be, I think, very satisfactory to hon. Members opposite.
The main object of my rising, however, was to deal with the question which the last speaker posed as to how we are going to make the scheme operate. I should like to put into the common stock of discussion my views as to how the schemes might be got going. In my view, it is no good for us to provide credit unless the credit is put to work, and put to work successfully. When we now talk about capital, we mean Government credit, and it is no good having any credit facilities unless they are put to work, and put to work effectively. One thing I hope we shall be beware of, and


that is the amateur scribblings of people who write books about "planning" and do not know what it means or what they are talking about.
The trouble lies in the selling of goods after they have been produced. I had to earn my living in selling goods before I came to this House. I know that goods have to be sold after they are made, and that unless you have skilled men who know how and where to sell goods by personal contacts you cannot turn your workmen's efforts into money. You cannot run an export business on "planning" or text-book theories. Few professors have ever run a prosperous manufacturing export trade. I seek to make the proposals of the Government work. I want to ask how we are going to make these credits operate, and in relation to what. That is the problem posed by the last speaker, and wisely posed too. I welcome it, because for one thing it gives me an opportunity to put forward my own views on these questions. The hon. Member talked about small businesses. I think we both agree that the credits ought not to be for-distribution, but rather for production, it may be for the export market; it is the best objective.
I do not agree with his view about small and big businesses. I have seen the small businesses work. I would prefer 50 small businesses, if they are going to be helped by this proposal, with £20,000 operating in each of them, than one business of £1,000,000. The wider you get your units of risk the less chance will there be of catastrophe. There is another thing, and that is that a small business can turn round and adapt itself to changing circumstances very much better and more swiftly than a big concern can. If you have a big business dominated by a proprietor or a board, one mistake may wreck the business, but you have to make 50 mistakes to wreck 50 businesses. I therefore suggest that hon. Members opposite should welcome small businesses rather than big concerns. The prosperity of the city of Birmingham, for instance, has been built up by small businesses in a variety of trades, and Birmingham has been able to weather the storm of the trade depression better than most other industrial centres in England. That brings us to the principle on which insurance

companies have worked since long ago, the spreading of risks wide and in small amounts. Consequently I think the policy that ought to be adopted in administering this scheme is that the authorities responsible should look for small businesses, small amounts and for a great variety of different types of trades.
What are the trades that can be encouraged to go to these distressed areas? There are already in existence there more than a plenty of coal undertakings, shipyards and engineering works. The best possible thing would be the development of new inventions which would enable really new trades to start there; but I do not see where to get new inventions. I would like here to say that I am not in favour of attracting trade away from other districts into the distressed areas. That would only mean robbing one district of employment in order to give it to another. Additional total employment is what we must seek. But how is that to be obtained?
The hon. Gentleman the Member for Seaham said that Labour Members might have to put aside the anti-capitalist principles on which they have so long relied. Do not hon. Members opposite now see that in frightening private enterprise and threatening capitalists who might otherwise have tried to open businesses in these distressed areas they have, to some extent, prolonged the distress in them? [HON. MEMBERS "No, no."] I am entitled to have my own opinion about the effect of the persistent attacks on the principles of private enterprise in productive industry by Socialist leaders. Moreover, the chronic tendency to quarrel which exists in some places sometimes has a psychological effect on employers and makes them unwilling to open new enterprises there. I suggest that there is a test as to whether this desire to quarrel is a psychological hindrance to the opening of new factories or the extension of old factories in the distressed areas.

Mr. G. GRIFFITHS: What did the Special Commissioner say about the subject which the hon. Member is now discussing? He said there was no truth in such a suggestion.

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: I do not say that what the Special Commissioner said is wrong, but I have my own opinion. Let


us take Luton as a test. Luton is a very prosperous town, and is attracting workers from the distressed areas, very largely from the North. I think that the societies and organisations which deal with psychology in industry should proceed to find out whether the general mentality of working people in Luton has been in any way altered by the influx of people who have had industrial quarrelsomeness instilled into them in the distressed areas. Is the mentality of the newcomers as amenable as that of the natives of the Luton area? We can learn much by studying the new Luton. There is no doubt that for generations past there has been in the coal mining areas a great deal of unrest and strife. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why?"] Never mind why; there has been. The existence of that habit is one of the reasons why it has not been possible to redress the trouble in the distressed areas.
What has created this habitual discontent in Wales? I would like to be able to get behind the minds of some of the great employers, because I often wonder whether their desire to leave Wales, for instance, and to go into other parts of England, is not partly due to their wishing to have a change of industrial atmosphere and to get away from the habitual unrest. If that be the case, hon. Gentlemen opposite must make up their minds that if new or fresh industries are to be invited to go into the distressed areas, they must tell the people who trust and follow them that the attack on private enterprise and capitalism by the Socialist party must stop. If attack on private enterprise is to continue, it will not be possible to get people to open businesses in those areas. The responsibility lies with the Socialist party. Let them think it over.

Miss WARD: May I ask the hon. Gentleman, in defence of the distressed areas, whether he has any evidence on which he bases his remarks?

Sir A. M. SAMUEL: It is our privilege in this House to make our individual contributions to the general stock of ideas. I submit that the reason I have given is one of the explanations why it has not been possible to get people from elsewhere to open new undertakings in the distressed areas.
I would like now to deal with the question of the fresh type of undertakings that could be started in those areas. I have already said that there is a superfluity of mines, shipyards and engineering works, and that I cannot see any new inventions, such as, formerly, coal tar products and the internal combustion engine, which would now enable new trades to be started. But when I was Minister for Overseas Trade and responsible for the British Pavilion in the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris in 1925, I visited the French portion of the exhibition and saw the large number of beautiful things made by the decorative luxury trade. I refer to luxury work in metals, wood, stone, decorative porcelain, glass, bronze and ormolu, such articles as are sold in Bond Street, Regent Street or Oxford Street, or in Mark et Street, Manchester. Many of those things might equally well be made in this country. They call for finger skill of the highest quality, and give employment to men, women and boys—in fact, they cover the whole craftsman population. As everybody knows, decorative goods are one of the main exports of France.
Moreover, we in this country used to make finer watches and clocks than are now made in and around Geneva. I do not see any reason why watches and clocks should be imported from abroad. We could revive the industry here. Those may seem far-fetched ideas, but I would remind the House that in 1924 there was a more far-fetched idea. It was this: Our exporting merchants had for long past found great difficulty in carrying on the export trade because of lack of insurance of credit. We set up an undertaking which was called the Exports Credit Scheme. But it was not accurately that. It was really insurance against risk of bad debts in the export market. It was administered by the Department of Overseas Trade and developed by the uncommonly efficient and enthusiastic staff of the Department of Overseas Trade. I went all over England in order to bring before the commercial community the advantage of the Export Credits scheme as providing a new tram line for trade. Previously insurance against bad debts in the export trade had been done a little by one or perhaps two insurance companies. As a result of the steps taken by the Department of Overseas Trade to explain the use and need for the scheme


throughout the country, we have to-day a system of cover for exporters which is continuously in play. When one period of credit has run out other credits come on and the trader is always covered by the Export Credits scheme with the Government's guarantee behind it. We had a good deal of trouble at first in getting traders to see the advantages of that scheme. But to-day there is annually, in aggregate, a volume of export trade of £10,000,000 to £15,000,000 covered against risk of bad debt and the scheme pays its way.
Some such method of explanation might be adopted to get new decorative trades started in the Special Areas. We want new undertakings in those areas. The factories are there, the schools, the roads, the waterworks and the like. The large industries like artificial silk, iron and steel and engineering and chemicals can shift for themselves. They want no financial help and they will go into the areas anyhow if they want to do so. But the small trades have to be helped, and they have to be selected and shown which can find markets for their goods. I believe that it can be done. We have in England to-day industries which are making increasing kinds of decorative goods. We have for instance, captured the toy trade. Toys used to be made abroad and sent to this country, but we have a fine toy manufacturing industry of our own now. We have also captured the trade in what are known as fashion shoes. Years ago, if you went round the West End you saw that ladies' fashion shoes were mostly of French or Swiss make. Somehow or other more of these small decorative trades should be started in the Special Areas. An attempt should be made to persuade private capitalists to start to make more luxury goods.
In connection with the Export Credits scheme we received priceless help, without any payment by the State, from a body of leading bankers in the City of London and Chamber of Commerce leaders, men of the highest financial ability and public spirit. They helped us with their advice on how to work the scheme; it now deals in millions and is useful and self-supporting. I am sure that if you went round the great emporiums in the West End and in Manchester and in Liverpool you would find men who could and would eagerly give you much valuable information and advice towards

the establishment of decorative industries. We should also get the Department of Overseas Trade to help. It could do a great deal. It would be possible, for instance, for it to provide samples of decorative goods which are now brought from abroad and which could be made here. It would be possible with the advice of the heads of West End firms and with the Government's help to get various factories reopened for making decorative goods in the distressed areas. Some of the manufacturers who are exhibitors at the British Industries Fair might be interrogated and encouraged by the advisory committee of retailers to take up the manufacture of more luxury and decorative articles. I believe that by approaching the problem in that way it would be possible to get a considerable number of people put to work.
It may seem to some hon. Members that it is a very far cry from the present position to such a possibility. Yet it seemed to me a very far cry from the time when the Export Credits scheme was first established until that new tram line for trade could be brought into working order. I had three years' experience of it and am now amazed at its success. We see in the national accounts what it is doing to-day. I am sure that the people of this country would help at every step that could he taken to put an end to the heartrending spectacle of the misery of the distressed areas. Each one of us is willing to put his hand to the plough in an effort to remedy the situation. I offer the suggestion I have made as my contribution to the proposals for fresh trades to deal with the unemployment, and I suggest to hon. Members opposite that the best thing they can do, in making their contribution, is to refrain from attacking capitalistic private enterprise.
We see what is happening in State enterprise in Italy and National-Socialist Germany to-day. There are no trade unions in those countries; there is no freedom of opinion or action there. We want to keep our trade unions and we want to keep our freedom of opinion and we want our people to go to work as free men. I do not think it is any good for us to accept these credit facilities unless we know how to make proper use of them. I see little or no possibility at the present time of much expan-


sion in the export trade and I was brought up to work in it. On the other hand, I foresee at the end of the next two years a shrinkage in house building. These are additional reasons why we should seek to get new industries at work. I think there are possibilities in the luxury decorative household trades and for all these reasons I venture to offer these suggestions in order to make the provision of credit now proposed, effective and successful.

8.30 p.m.

Mr. KINGSLEY GRIFFITH: The House will be grateful to the hon. Baronet for a very illuminating and interesting contribution to the Debate. I only wish that he had not included among so much that was helpful, the suggestion of trade being driven away from these areas by political agitation. He is, as he says, entitled to express his opinion but on a matter which reflects upon the atmosphere—if I may put it in that way—of those places where unemployment is so bad, I think it is better that evidence should be given by those who are in touch with the districts. The Commissioner who is dealing with the causes of the present distress finds no evidence of this factor as a contributory cause and it is better not to cloud our minds with suppositions which may seem possible at first, but when tested, prove to have nothing in them.
I agree emphatically with what the hon. Baronet said about small industries. The collapse of whole areas of our country has been largely due to the fact that they were dependent on one or two industries. With changing circumstances, such as the development of oil causing a reduced demand for coal, it was not this business or that which was affected, but whole towns and whole areas. There is greater resilience and elasticity in an area where there are various subsidiary trades able to bear some part of the strain when the strain comes. Because I think that the present proposals are on lines of that kind I am not going to take the attitude of scornful condemnation adopted by the hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell). I do not think this is the occasion to go into the whole question of the distressed areas. My views on it have been given on many occasions and probably will be again. I want to

deal with the proposal on its merits and I do not think we should criticise each brick that is brought forward because it is not the whole building. If I thought this was intended to be the whole building I might echo the sentiments of the hon. Member for Seaham, but we are to have a great many other suggestions besides this.
In the meantime we must remember that this is a suggestion put forward, I believe, by the Commissioner himself and advocated by the North-Eastern Development Board. Therefore, it was worth the Government's consideration and I am not going to throw cold water on it now that the Government have brought it forward in this form. I hope it will be a success. The criticism which I am bound, from my own point of view, to make is based on the words which limit it to the areas specified in the first Schedule of the Act of 1934. When that Schedule was before the House I pointed out that the harm of it was htat it was an unscientific and baseless list of places, not properly thought out. The whole of that Schedule limits the benefits that would accrue under that Bill. I do not think the benefits were very great, as a matter of fact, but the Schedule was almost bound to be taken as the basis of future legislation and proposals.
My words have been adequately borne out by the facts. In the London Passenger Transport Bill expenditure was limited to these areas, and now we find the limitation again in this Financial Resolution. If we part with the Resolution in this form we are trying our hands and it will not be possible afterwards to get other areas in, so that the point has to be dealt with now. I take it as a most unsatisfactory feature of this legislation that a definition of the Special Areas has been laid down as the result of pure accident when the present Secretary of the Overseas Trade Department, who was then Civil Lord, made his investigations, he had not time to get to the Tees-side and did not pretend to make any examination of it. The question whether it ought to be in the Special Areas has never even been considered by the Government, who took the Schedule of the places which the hon. and gallant Member visited and there they stopped. The result is that this area, which has a larger rate of unemployment than a good many important places which are inside


the North-Eastern Special Area, is excluded from the benefits, such as they are, of the original Bill, from preferential treatment in regard to contracts under Bills such as that of the London Passenger Transport Board, and now it is ruled out of the possibility of getting further trade started by the kind of help which the Government are now offering.
I wish some representative of the Ministry of Labour were here because, in a sense, it is no good my addressing these remarks to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. It is a matter for the Ministry of Labour primarily in consultation, of course, with the Treasury. Are they going on this false basis for ever? Is this wretched Schedule going to turn up like Banquo's ghost at any moment in our legislation? I suggest that it is ridiculous that a purely accidental piece of emergency drafting—because that is what it was—should perpetuate itself in legislation and largely cramp the possibility for good of measures such as this. It may be said by hon. Members who are inside the Special Areas that if others are to be taken in the butter will be spread even thinner and that this £1,000,000 will have to go further.
I want to believe, however, that the Government, in bringing forward this proposal, are conducting an experiment and are not delivering a final judgment, and that if they find expenditure along these lines on the scale in which they have laid it down here is successful, they will enlarge their experiment and go on. I hope I may receive some assurance that this is not the end of the chapter but that it is to be regarded as an experiment which will be pursued with energy and enthusiasm if it is found that its first steps are profitable. I have endeavoured to avoid in this speech any kind of language of recrimination. I think that hon. Members know that I have had acquaintance with distressed areas long enough to feel as much as anyone about them, and I desire to take advantage of everything which the Government propose to see it worked out properly and to hope the best for it.

8.40 p.m.

Mr. W. JOSEPH STEWART: I often wonder as I sit in the House whether the Front Bench opposite really understands the problems that are vexing us in the Special Areas. Sometimes I would

like to take a deputation from the Government side to Durham County and let them see for themselves the difficulties and disabilities under which thousands of our people are labouring. We in Durham and the people living in other Special Areas expected more from this Budget. We expected, when the Government decided to send investigators into the Special Areas, that something more would be done than the giving of a paltry £1,000,000 out of a Budget totalling £798,000,000. When economy was the craze, the promise was made that those who had made sacrifices would be rewarded by prosperity. Instead, the people are being asked to make further sacrifices. There is no sign of prosperity, but what is being asked for is an increased expenditure for armaments. The £1,000,000 which has been allocated in this scheme will not be sufficient to meet to any appreciable extent the problems by which we are surrounded. An hon. Member opposite suggested that there were certain factors operating in the distressed areas which prevented new industries being started and that it was perhaps owing to labour troubles. I was interested in reading a speech of the Chairman of the Federation of British Industries, Sir Francis Joseph. He was dealing with the question of new industries and the trek towards the southern counties, and he said:
The southward trend of industry is a subject that ought to be commented on. It is suggested that with reasonable prosperity industry will soon have to tackle this problem. Along the great arteries that open up the country you can see long lines of new factories. They are attractive in appearance and economical in the cost of production. The cost of making goods in these new factories is lower than it is in the old ones. What is the lesson? It is that our old factories in our old towns have got to be pulled down and rebuilt. In my opinion that is the only way the trek of industry to the south can be arrested. It has got to be arrested because the population is reaching saturation point in the great London area.
The Chancellor and the other Members of the Government know full well that what is needed in the Special Areas are new factories. We want to get rid of the old buildings and have new ones to attract new industries to the north-east coast instead of to the southern counties, but this £1,000,000 is not sufficient to clear the old sites and to build factories and get new industries going on the scale that is necessary. Hon. Mem-


hers have suggested to-night that perhaps labour troubles and kindred causes explain why we do not get these new industries. I was interested in the report of the special invesigator, who was a member of the Government, I think. In that report he suggested that if there are to be new industries in Durham county the rate problem ought to be tackled, that as long as rates remain as high as they are we shall not get new industries started there. In Durham county there are more people per 1,000 in receipt of poor relief than in any other county in England and Wales. If we wish to get industries under way in that county we must give the county council a subsidy of £700,000 per year. That report has been submitted to the Government, but they are not acting on that submission.
The Commissioner for Special Areas also dealt with the question of high rates and of new industries, and pointed out that if we wanted anything done that was worth while we must consider the question of the 40-hour week. My hon. Friend who opened this discussion spoke of what has been done at Geneva about the 40-hour week, and the Special Commissioner has referred to the same question and suggested that in the interests of industry and of the unemployed the Government should give the question very serious consideration. To me it is alarming to find that in Durham County, with all that has been done by the Government —and they tell us they have done much—there are still 63,046 people who have been unemployed for over a year, 40,729 unemployed for more than three years, and 18,540 unemployed for more than five years. The Industrial Transference Board, which was expected to deal with this problem to a certain extent, has told us that there is no possibility of transferring people if they are over 35 years of age. There are in the county at the moment more than 52,000 people over that age who we cannot have transferred owing to their family commitments.
According to the return of the Board of Trade for 1934 the new industries started in the country numbered 478, but only seven were set up in the Special Areas, and of 144 extensions there were only seven extensions in the Special Areas, showing conclusively that industrialists are not prepared to start industries there

at the moment. That being so, surely it is the responsibility of the Government to see that machinery is brought into being which will help to direct the trek of industry not to the southern counties but to the north-east coast and the Special Areas generally. The only way to do that, as has been suggested by the chairman of the Federation of British Industries, is to make it possible for new factories to be built. If new factories are set up, there may an opportunity of getting new industries into the areas.
Time and again we have asked the Government to come to our assistance in Durham county and do something worth while as a measure of relief to that hard-pressed industrial area. The burden may be gauged somewhat by a few facts which have been compiled by responsible officers of the Durham County Council. In Durham we are spending each week on able-bodied and ordinary relief £21,424, an annual amount of £1,114,048. If we deduct the estimated annual expenditure on cases to be taken over by the Unemployment Assistance Board it still leaves us with £851,597 to find out of the rates. If we add the contribution to the Unemployment Assistance Board, which is £62,320, it brings the gross total of the cost of public assistance in the county to £913,917. As I said a while ago, when the question of the burden of poor relief was gone into by the investigator and the commissioner, they suggested that we ought to have a grant from the National Exchequer to help the county to regain a little of its prosperity, but up to now nothing has been done by the Government, except to offer this £1,000,000 to cover the whole of the depressed areas, which will bring little or no relief to a county like Durham.
The hon. Member who opened the Debate this evening suggested that some of us dare not go back to our constituencies because we are beseiged by people pointing out to us the difficulties under which they are labouring and which this Government are not helping to any appreciable extent to alleviate. I know mining villages in Durham where people are living under appalling conditions; in many cases they have lost hope through prolonged unemployment. People sent there to make inquiries as to what has happened compiled a report on these lines:


It is a most depressing fact that the results of this immense annual expenditure should amount at best to no more than the stabilisation of a state of affairs presenting so many undesirable features. Prolonged unemployment is destroying the confidence and self-respect of a large part of the population, their fitness for work is being steadily lost, and the anxiety of living always upon a bare minimum without any margin of resources or any hope of improvement is slowly sapping their nervous strength and their powers of resistance. Instances occur of men who have been out of employment for long periods being unable to stand the return to work. They find new conditions obtaining in the shops, they themselves are lacking in confidence and vitality….
That is not the result of anything that those people have done, but is owing to the fact that that great county is suffering from industrial stagnation. What obtains in the village mentioned by the investigator obtains in many villages in Durham county. I have gone into some of those villages and found people living under conditions which are a disgrace to this country and to twentieth century civilisation, and yet near by has been a colliery where industrialism, in the interests of profit, has wrested its profits out of the blood and sweat of the very people who are living under such appalling conditions.
Hon. Members on the other side of the House may seek to tinker with that problem and may give a little palliative here and there, hoping to tide over the difficulties that present themselves, but the time is not far distant in the North-West of England, and in the coalfields of South Wales, when there will arise a volume of indignation against you which will sweep you from those benches and will put into this House a group of men and women who understand the workers' position from the workers' point of view. You have had your opportunity in this Budget, and you have had it since 1931; up to now, as far as the workers are concerned, you have miserably failed. I come from the most hard-hit county in England and Wales. Its people have looked to you, with your big majority, to do something for them and at least to bring a ray of hope into their dark lives, but you have done nothing. You have sent your people up to investigate and they have compiled their report. You have had two reports from your Special Commissioner who has made suggestions along certain lines. If you had followed

those suggestions, there would have been a certain measure of relief for those areas.
What are you going to do? What are your programme and your policy? Have you a policy to deal with the depressed areas? If you have not, and if you have made up your minds to do nothing, be honest enough to tell us. Then we can go back to those areas and tell the people that as a Government you are bankrupt in ideas of a constructive nature, and that you are not prepared to do anything in the interests of those people. I often wonder whether the time is near when the patience of our people will become exhausted. Do not try it too far. As we had demonstrations in 1934 which made the Government of the day sit up and take notice, so you may have demonstrations of greater dimensions, and meaning more, in the near future, of you do not rise to your responsibilities and do something for the people who are depressed, who are living in semi-starvation and whose homes are depleted. They have practically no home comforts, and their children are hindered from attending school for lack of boots and clothing, and they will demand of you something worth while. If you have it to offer to them, offer it; if not, tell them that you are not prepared to do anything more.

9.1 p.m.

Miss WARD: I want to preface my very brief remarks to-night with a few words of thanks to the Government for undertaking this experiment, which arose out of the recommendation made, I understand, by Mr. Malcolm Stewart in his last report. Most of the speeches tonight have been speeches of criticism, so perhaps I may venture, if he requires any fortification, to fortify the Financial Secretary to the Treasury by saying that the Northern Group met to-night for the first time since the Budget was introduced, and passed a resolution of thanks to His Majesty's Government for undertaking this new financial experiment, to try to give one more piece of help to the distressed areas. It always interests me to listen to the criticism offered by hon. Gentlemen above the Gangway. Criticisms are very easy to make. It is not the making of promises which is difficult, but the translation of promises into reality. I shall offer one or two criticisms of the extent of the proposals which are put forward by my hon. and learned Friend, but


that will not mean that I am not proud to think that the Government which I have the honour to support are prepared to make an experiment, although somewhat limited, in an entirely new direction.
Before I embark upon the criticisms which I have to offer, I must say one word to my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel). To those who do not come from the Special Areas I would observe that I quite appreciate that everybody in this House has the right to express opinions. It would be a sad thing if that province of Members were taken away. Although I am a believer in and a supporter of the National Government because I believe in their policy as opposed to the policy of hon. Members above the Gangway, I am first and foremost a representative of my area, and when I hear my hob. Friend refer to what he thinks is the attitude of the workers or of the employés in distressed areas, I say to him that it is a wonderful thing to me how the people in the distressed areas have remained as quiet as they have. I say that as a Conservative representing, not only my own point of view, but the point of view of hundreds, indeed thousands, of supporters of the National Government. It is not because we are not loyal to the Government, for we believe in their policy, and we know that the policy of hon. and right hon. Gentleman above the Gangway would be ruination for our area.
That, however, does not make us view the situation in any spirit of complacency, and, although I hate to use the word "resent," because I think it is rather a hard word to use, yet I must say that, when people make the kind of statements that were made in that speech, it does prove to me that they have no idea of the spirit which prevails in our areas, and the marvellous way in which people in those areas have put up with distress, wardship and unemployment for very many years. I hope that before the end of this Parliament I shall be in the happy position of congratulating His Majesty's Government on having really produced a policy which is of some benefit to those areas.

Mr. BATEY: You will be disappointed.

Miss WARD: My hon. Friend, who is always so interested in interrupting any

speeches that I may make with the same words, says that I shall be disappointed, but the measure of my disappointment with my own Government will be nothing compared with the measure of disappointment that I should have felt had hon. Gentlemen above the Gangway been sitting on the benches opposite.
There are one or two points that I should like to mention. I took the trouble to telegraph to the North East Coast Development Board to ask them how far they were in support of the Government's proposals, that is to say, whether they had any real criticisms to offer, and whether they felt that the proposals put forward were satisfactory to them. Although I do not think my hon. Friend requires any reminding, I would just emphasise that for a very long period we have been pressing His Majesty's Government to experiment in this direction, and I have never quite understood why they had to wait until the introduction of the Budget to accept the recommendation of Mr. Malcolm Stewart, because, as the Chancellor himself pointed out in his Budget speech, it really had not anything to do with the Budget; but it was perhaps just an appropriate moment to introduce the subject. I regret that it has taken His Majesty's Government so long before they made up their minds and proposed the experiment. The reply that I received from the North East Coast Development Board was that they were not prepared to offer an opinion until they had heard more in detail what the proposals of the Chancellor really meant, and I hope that my hon. Friend to-night is going to tell us in very much more detail exactly what the proposals mean. One finds that so often legislation is passed before the real criticisms—it may be, of course, that that is what the Government desire—have been appreciated by the interested parties, and therefore I want a very full and frank explanation of all the details involved in this new undertaking, so that we may be in a position to press the Government in certain directions if their suggestions are not entirely satisfactory.
I must say that I am a little apprehensive as to the total amount of money involved, and I desire to emphasise this point to my hon. Friend. He will be aware that on the North East Coast—


and I presume that the same applies to all development boards in the Special Areas, and, indeed, to development boards in counties which are not included in the Special Areas—the difficulty has been that, although they have raised a certain amount of money themselves through their own initiative, that is to say, by subscriptions from people interested in the area, the work of the Development Board over the past two years has been retarded because of the small amount of capital which they have had available. A million of money may sound quite a large sum, but it does not seem to me that it is a very large sum in relation to the possible drawings on it, and I should like an assurance from my hon. Friend that, if this proposal proves really successful, and there seems to be a real demand for the capital, then, governed always by principles of sound finance—because one does not want to waste public money in reckless expenditure on companies which are not going to be stable—I should like an assurance from my hon. Friend that, if it is a success, we shall not have a tremendous battle again with the Chancellor to get an increase. I should also like an assurance from my hon. Friend that the allocation of this capital is not going to be surrounded by restrictions and conditions in the same way in which the work of Mr. Malcolm Stewart under the Special Areas Act was restricted. Although it is sometimes glossed over by the Government, and even by supporters of the Government, and it is sometimes a little difficult to get all the necessary information, I have a very shrewd suspicion that a great deal of work which the Commissioner would have recommended has not been recommended because it was outside the scope of the Special Areas Act. I want to be assured that, if responsible bodies are set up with a full sense of responsibility, they will not be hampered if they are desirous of giving grants to companies which can run and should run efficiently for the benefit of the area. Another point that I want to make is as to the interpretation of what the Chancellor meant when he said:
It is proposed that as a general rule advances will be limited to a maximum of £10,000 in the case of any one loan."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st April, 1936; col 52, Vol. 311.]
I should like an interpretation of what the right hon. Gentleman means by "a

general rule." We are not so depressed on the North-East Coast that we cannot go out sometimes for big business, and, as the trade of the country improves and the general spirit of confidence which one can detect at the present time on the North-Fast Coast increases, so there is a greater chance for industry. I happened to hear the other day quite specifically—it was not just something in the air—of a company that was desirous of setting up on the North-East Coast, and wanted for the purpose a very much larger capital than £10,000. I should like to know whether, if the responsible body which is going to be set up comes forward with a proposal for the formation of a company which is going to give definite employment, and which desires an even larger capital than £10,000, but which, because of the circumstances of the Special Area, cannot run the finance in the ordinary way, the interpretation of the Chancellor's words is such that that company will be able to obtain any portion of the necessary capital from this special fund. I should very much like to obtain as much detail as possible about the fund.
I conclude my remarks by saying once more than we are grateful for this one step forward, but I should also like to take this opportunity—and I think I shall have behind me the good will and support of my colleagues in the Northern Group—of expressing the hope that, when the new Act is passed, the Government will not think they have done all that is necessary, because those of us who represent the Special Areas feel that we want a very great deal more, and, moreover, that when the country is in a much more prosperous state we shall not be prepared to wait quite as patiently as we have waited during the rather bad times when we realised that the Government were going through very heavy weather. It is very nice to hear and I am very proud of the Government that has produced such a result, but for my area we want a very great deal more.

9.15 p.m.

Mr. A. JENKINS: I should not have risen but for the intervention of the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel), who referred to the disputes that have characterised some parts of the Special Areas as being a detriment to new industries coming into those


areas. I remember the hon. Baronet raising the same question a month or more ago when he got what I thought a very handsome reply from the Prime Minister, who pointed out that from his own experience the industries in the Special Areas, and particularly in South Wales, other than the mining industry, had had a very long period of peace. That is characteristic of the great majority, if not all the industries in those areas. I frankly admit that it is unfortunate that the mining industry has been characterised by industrial stoppages more frequently than most of us would desire, but it is most unfortunate that any Member should make those charges. I listened attentively to the hon. Baronet to find out whether he would be able or not to adduce evidence of the statement he has made on two occasions, but no evidence was forthcoming.
There has been a great deal of talk recently in South Wales of one industry being removed to another part of the country, an industry in which there has not been an industrial dispute for at least 40 years. It is Richard Thomas and Company, who have operated quite successfully in tinplates for very many years. It is high time there was some authority in this land which could prevent owners of industries removing them from one part of the country to another as they think fit. Some industrialists show a total disregard for the welfare of those residing in their areas and for the enormous amount of social capital in those areas. We have all the requirements for carrying on the industry and for carrying on the social services, but nevertheless we get attempts on the part of some firms to remove their industries.
I listened intently to the Chancellor of the Exchequer one day last week when he was quite definite in his view that tariffs had in no way been responsible for the situation in South Wales. I do not think anyone would assert that tariffs are entirely responsible, but I do not think anyone would dispute that national policy throughout the years has to a very large extent been responsible for creating the present situation in South Wales and in other Special Areas. It is important to remember that the Special Areas have been growing upon us year after year. This is not a thing of recent growth.

Long before I became a Member of the House, as far back as 1928, I took part in deputations waiting upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was then Minister of Health, endeavouring to prevail upon him to take some definite action to prevent the situation that has arisen in these areas. Rates were bounding upwards and unemployment was increasing, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to meet the social services required in those areas. All the time the right hon. Gentleman has been pretty niggardly in facing up to that situation. We had great difficulty in getting a substantial contribution to the cost of the maintenance of the able-bodied unemployed. At the best we only got a 60–40 arrangement, and to-day that weighs very heavily upon these areas. In Glasgow, I believe the cost will be about £400,000, whereas the cost in Birmingham is £40,000. That shows the unfair incidence of an arrangement of that kind.
The hon. Member for Houghton-le-Spring (Mr. W. Joseph Stewart) in a very moving speech referred to the heavy burden that they are carrying in Durham. The same thing applies to the whole of the special areas. In the whole of the South Wales Special Area the public assistance rate liability is little less than 9s. in the £, but the average public assistance rate for the whole of the country is not in excess of 3s. in the £. If we are going to bring new industries into these areas, clearly the Government will have to face the responsibility of meeting these liabilities. I do not think that the reason for the failure of industries in coming to these areas is that referred to by the hon. Baronet, but I can understand the objection on the part of employers to coming into these areas when they have a heavy rate liability to meet and other heavy charges as well. That might influence anyone who desired to establish an industry there. One of the steps that the Government could easily take is to see to it that the local authorities in those areas should not be involved in a heavier rate liability in the maintenance of their services than the average for the whole country. That would be a substantial improvement.
I am not going to criticise the proposal for the establishment of a new company which will be able to use the Government guarantee up to £1,000,000 in order to establish new small industries. We are


in the position of wanting all we can get. My criticism is that the Chancellor has not gone far enough and that he has been so slow in going as far as he has gone. He should have gone thus far years ago. Even now, in this proposal, he tells us again that it is an experiment. I have been looking at a speech made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as far back as 1934, when he was speaking in the House on the Special Areas. That was two years ago, and the Chancellor then said:
Although in the present case we need not describe the disease as desperate, it certainly is sufficiently exceptional to warrant exceptional treatment. What we want here, as it seems to us, is something more rapid, more direct, less orthodox if you like, than the ordinary plan."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 14th November, 1934; cols. 1995–96, Vol. 293.]
I should like to know whether anything at all has been done which is more rapid or less orthodox. We have had these areas growing on us from month to month and From year to year until at the present time our people are in the plight that we heard described from this side of the House a few minutes ago. In South Wales we have in the Special Area roughly 30 per cent. of our people unemployed and dependent on public funds. We have practically one-third of the people with a purchasing power which is dependent entirely on the amount they can get from public funds. That is a very serious detriment to any business coming there.
Now that the Chancellor has brought this proposal forward I think he should see to it that it is not limited to the £10,000 loans which have been referred to. That amount will be too small. Today I was talking to a man well versed in business who told me that in his opinion the £10,000 per business will not be very good; even for a small business a sum of £30,000 at least will be required. After we have got this scheme so that we can have some small businesses established what is going to be done by the Chancellor with a view to determining the location of the new industries that are to be developed? Are we to see the South go on building its factories, are we to see the Midlands go on extending, while these other areas are continuously contracting? The Chancellor has not told us that he will prevent that from being done. I am not quite sure that I fully

understand how the new industries in the Special Areas will get any special or particular financial treatment. They will be able to borrow the money, it is true; but they will, I imagine, have to pay interest on the borrowed money in exactly the same way as if they got it from the banks. It is true that they will have certain guarantees if there are losses. But I have yet to learn what special advantage they will get from this new scheme, and I would like the Chancellor—or the Financial Secretary if he replies—to be more explicit as to how this new company is going to set up these new industries at the more rapid rate which the Chancellor in 1934 said was necessary. I am hoping that we shall have a clear statement in regard to that.
I do not wish to take up too much times on this question, but like others who have spoken to-night I have a good deal of feeling on this matter. I feel that quite a number of hon. Members on the opposite side will not have seen these Special Areas in the plight in which we see them. Some of us have worked in those pits with the men who are now idle and whose homes are in distress, and who cannot provide even the barest necessities for their wives and children. I would ask hon. Gentlemen opposite to go to their divisions at the week-end and to see the men with whom they have worked and lived in that plight: Then they would come to this House with a great deal of feeling too. These are the best men it is possible for one to meet and know, and they are left in that plight. I say that the onus is on the Government of the day, whatever Government it may be, to see to it that there shall be re-created in these areas industries that will give the people work at least on the basis of the average of the work that is available in the country.

9.32 p.m.

Mr. MANDER: There is only one short point which I want to raise in connection with this Resolution. The actual proposal is a very interesting one upon which the Chancellor is to be congratulated, and I only hope that the experiment he is making will prove so successful and helpful that he will be able to extend it to other areas outside the Special Areas. I am sure that everyone will desire to do anything possible to take up any practicable scheme in an experimental way


to help those areas; but we must be careful that in helping those areas we do not, incidentally, do something unfair to other areas which are not so badly off but which still require all the attention and support they can get. We must exercise a little care and the Government might be a little more explicit in their policy on this matter. May I give one example? There is in Wolverhampton a very active Industrial Development Association which spends a great deal of time and money in pointing out the advantages to manufacturers by coming to that town. That association has been not unsuccessful. Recently, in the course of that business, they were able to attract a very important steel plant. Everything was arranged, the land was bought, and employment would have been given to a very considerable number of men. But then, suddenly, it was understood that the Government had brought pressure to bear in other directions in the interest of the Special Areas and the factory was put up somewhere else.
That may have been a perfectly right decision to arrive at; it may have been that the Special Areas were the right place for it. That is not my point. One must not take a selfish view about a matter of that kind. But I do say that the Government ought to state explicitly what their policy is for the benefit of towns which are endeavouring to attract manufacturers. If influence is going to be used to draw them away, quite properly and quite wisely perhaps, then I think these other towns ought to be told and warned not to go beyond a certain stage. Possibly they should consult with some Government Department in order that they may devote their energies to something that is really going to come off and so that all their efforts should not be wasted. I hope that whoever is to reply for the Government will be able to give some guidance to many towns which are in this position, and which, while most anxious to do anything they can, not to stand in the way of the Special Areas are naturally looking after their own interests.

9.35 p.m.

Mr. FURNESS: I had not really intended to take any part in this Debate, but when I heard the speech of the hon. Gentleman the Member for

Houghton-le-Spring (Mr. W. Joseph Stewart), who is a very near neighbour of mine in county Durham, I felt that perhaps it would be well if some hon. Member who came from those parts, and who sat on this side of the House, could put a view upon this question. The question of the Special areas should not be approached with the idea that it can be solved by any one remedy. That is where I would quarrel very strongly indeed with the hon. Member for Houghton-le-Spring. This problem will be solved by the application of a number of remedies, any one of which, by itself, might not be very effective. The problem with which we are faced in county Durham is really one which arises from the decay of two big industries upon which our prosperity was built up, that is, first of all, coal mining, and secondly, shipbuilding. Our problem, and the unemployment and distress in that county are not due to any fault at all of our own. It is due to the pressure of economic conditions, and particularly to the policy of economic nationalism which has been followed all over the world since the War, which has cut down the market for our coal and, by destroying the volume of international trade, has cut down the number of ships which are required. That is our problem. Unfortunately, that condition has resulted in a great wastage and shinkage of the capital available for investment within the county itself.
As anybody who is acquainted with the conditions will know, it is now, in some parts particularly of county Durham, very difficult to get any number of people to join in industrial development. Some of the people who had money have left, others have lost what, they had, and still others have become so discouraged that there is no spirit left in them. In the old days before the War in county Durham, it was easier to get industry started there than in any other part of the country. The people in county Durham had seen the growth of prosperity from year to year, and they were naturally adventurous and enterprising and were able to develop those great local industries which were developed so successfully. But in recent years the experience has been quite different. It is because this is one step towards helping us to get the financial aid which we need so badly, and which can no longer be


obtained locally, that I welcome the proposal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I do not think that it will do very much in itself. I personally believe that we who, on both sides of this House, represent constituencies in the distressed areas have to fight a very stubborn battle. We have a great deal of ground to cover and we can only make an advance by making one step at a time. This is one more step forward, and I welcome it for that reason.
There is one thing more that I should like to say, and I only say it, not to attack any hon. or right hon. Gentleman on this side, but because it is rather important for the sake of county Durham itself. It is absolutely false, and ludicrous really, to anybody who knows the county, to speak as if the people up there were most disagreeable, almost uncivilised, and certainly people who were on the alert all the time looking for chances of great industrial unrest. The true facts are absolutely contrary. I should think that people in county Durham are more loyal to their employers and to the job in which they work than any other people in this country. They are almost sentimental in their local loyalty and in their devotion to their own particular firm. Anybody who knows any of the shipbuilding yards will know that the men have an almost sentimental attachment to them and would sooner work in the yard in which they first started as boys than go round to the next yard for a, job with perhaps more prospects.
The history of industry in that county will show that, except for one particular instance, about which I am not really competent to speak, there have been very few industrial disputes indeed. I personally cannot remember in my lifetime a stoppage in the steel trade. There may have been one, but I personally do not remember it, and I do not think that there has been more than one stoppage of any moment in the shipbuilding industry since the War. That is not a bad record, and industrial trouble is no reason at all for people refusing to start industries in that area. The real trouble is that we have for so long been dependent upon a few industries. Through no fault of our own those industries are depressed, and it is because we are depressed that we are likely to get more

depressed. It is just the same as the man who is in financial difficulties—his condition is likely to get worse rather than better unless outside help is given. I welcome this not because it is a big thing in itself, but because it is a step forward, and I think that it will do some good.

9.42 p.m.

Mr. BATEY: I was interested in the speech delivered by the hon. Lady the Member for Wallsend (Miss Ward), and I am sorry that she is not here at the moment. It seemed to me that if she had been a Methodist preacher she would have divided her address into two parts. The first would have expressed gratitude and thanks to the Government, and, secondly, it would have been a criticism of the amount of money the Government have given. She asked the Government for details of what they mean to do I am glad that at last the Government have come to recognise that if something is to be done for the distressed areas they will have to do it. I regard this as a step in the right direction, only it is too short and too feeble a step. Instead of £1,000,000, the Government ought to have come forward with £20,000,000, and that would not have been too much for the distressed areas. I want to emphasise the point made by the hon. Lady the Member for Wallsend as to what the Government really mean by this proposal. I do not ask for details, but I would ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Financial Secretary, whoever replies to-night, to say what they really mean. The Chancellor of the Exchequer last Thursday night, in endeavouring to explain the matter, left it far from clear. He said:
In the first place, I do not think it is proposed that the assistance should be confined to any particular form of industry, whether productive or distributive. I anticipate that the general desire will be that this financial assistance should be directed, as far as possible, to those kinds of industries which are likely to give the greatest amount of employment, and that covers also the question of small industries. As regard the much larger industries, I do not think those are industries which could be brought into this category at all."— [OFFICIA L REPORT, 23rd April, 1936; col. 430, Vol. 311.]
The Chancellor of the Exchequer ought to explain what he means by the smaller industries that will give the greatest amount of employment. If there is to


be no money to assist large industries and only small industries are to be assisted, one fails to see that they will give a great amount of employment. This matter must have been thought out before the sum of £1,000,000 was suggested, and I should like the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tell us what those small industries are that will give the greatest amount of employment. I should also like him to explain where it is proposed to set up these industries. This sum of £1,000,000 is for all the distressed areas under the Fourth Schedule of the Act of 1934. That means Durham, part of Northumberland, Cumberland, South Wales and Scotland. According to the Fourth Schedule, the £1,000,000 would apply to 77 boroughs, eight non-county boroughs, 79 villages, large and small, in the North East of England, in Cumberland, Wales and Scotland. That is a large number of places to which the £1,000,000 would have to apply.
If the Chancellor of the Exchequer can tell us where he means to start these industries, I am afraid that we shall find that there will not be many industries started in every part of the distressed areas. If the sum is to be only £1,000,000, it will only be one of the distressed areas that will be affected, and a very small part. The hon. Member for Wallsend reminded us that the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget speech referred to this matter as experimental. Some of us have been pleading the case of the distressed areas so long that we do not like the word "experiment." After all these years we should no longer be experimenting with the distressed areas. If it is to be merely a matter of experimenting, it does not hold out much hope. One hon. Member referred to a speech made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1934, when he referred to the experiments that were to be tried by the Commissioners, then being appointed for the distressed areas. He said on that occasion:
We are going to give the Commissioners a very wide discretion. They must not be afraid of trying experiments, even if those experiments fail.
The Minister of Labour, in December, 1934, referring to the same matter, said that the Commissioner should start off with enough money to make it quite certain that they will be enabled to under-

take any experiments in work which they think are necessary. The House then voted £2,000,000 for the purpose of making experiments, and nearly two years afterwards we see the result. We see that the experiments that have been tried have been an absolute failure in the distressed areas. They have proved valueless. Of the £2,000,000 which the House voted on that occasion the Commissioner for the distressed areas has only spent £330,000 to help the distressed areas. If we are going to vote £1,000,000 to-night and wait another two years to find that only a few thousand pounds of that £1,000,000 have been spent, this additional experiment will also be a failure.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer must be prepared to drop the idea that the £1,000,000 will help the distressed areas. The Commissioner for the distressed areas has given his attention to a trading estate in County Durham and he is proposing to help a deep-water scheme on the Tyne. That deep-water scheme on the Tyne will not help us in the distressed areas in the south-west part of the County of Durham. What some of us are anxious about is that something should be done in order to revive our colliery villages, because it is in the colliery villages in the south-west where there is no hope at all. The National Council of Social Service issued a report recently, in which they referred to one of the villages in my division, the village of Tow Law. They say:
As an example of the many-sided schemes in which co-operative effort is being made by the local efforts of the National Council, Tow Law, in County Durham, may be instanced. This village of 4,000 souls grew up around cool pits and an iron foundry. The iron foundry has long been abandoned. The pits ceased work seven years ago.
What is this proposal for £1,000,000 going to do for a village like that? Is it proposed to set up an industry in that village, which is only typical of scores of villages in the County of Durham where pits have been dismantled, where there is no other industry and where men cannot get employment? What is the Chancellor of the Exchequer going to do for those villages? Does he propose to set up a new industry in each one of those villages? If so, £1,000,000 will not help us very far. The Commissioner in his last report on the Special Areas said that


whereas in the Special Areas there were 401,920 miners insured in 1934, the figure had dropped in 1935 to 384,470. In a year there had been a reduction in the number of insured miners of 17,450. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer is making this proposal, we have a right to ask him what he is going to do for the miners in those distressed areas. At present there is no hope for theta. Nothing that the Commissioner has done has touched the fringe of the question. Is this sum of £1,000,000 going to help them out of their poverty? I submit that £1,000,000 is far too small.
There is only one thing for the Government to do, as I have said again and again in this House, if they are to help us in the County of Durham, and that is for them to find £10,000,000 to set up plant for the extraction of oil from coal. Nothing else will help us as far as I can see. At the same time I am glad that the Government are recognising that it is their duty to find money. What we want in Durham is money, and the only place from which we can get it is the Government. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer, instead of giving his attention to a loan for armaments, would do what he can to re-establish the coal industry in the distressed area of Durham, there would be some hope for us, but until he does that there is no hope. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will not be satisfied with voting £1,000,000 for the distressed areas. It is not sufficient. It may be a step in the right direction, but I hope the right hon. Gentleman will face the question of raising a far bigger sum in order to help us out of our poverty.

9.57 p.m.

Mr. JAMES GRIFFITHS: The House will agree that the problem with which we are dealing is an immense one and no one would desire to minimise its importance. The hon. Member for Sunderland (Mr. Furness) said quite rightly that the problem of the Special Areas has been largely created by the decline or collapse of two great industries, coal mining and shipbuilding and, particularly, the collapse of the coal exporting section of the industry. There is another feature of these Special Areas. In the last century when they became crowded and busy centres of life they are an example of that complete lack of planning which is characteristic of this country. Take South

Wales. From 1875 to 1913 South Wales grew like a hothouse plant. In that period the average output of coal in South Wales increased at the rate of 1,000,000 tons per year and the number of persons finding employment in the industry increased at the rate of 4,000 a year. They were the days of the black diamonds, when fortunes were to be made in South Wales, when capitalists were not afraid of South Wales, because it was a profitable part of the country. They were the days when the best of our youth in our mining villages were attracted to the industry by the high wages. It was easy to get capital to be sunk in the pits without any guarantee from the Exchequer because of the handsome profits which were made. Then came the War, and at the end of the War came the decline which has gone on ever since and reduced the area to its present plight.
During those 25 years there was no effort by anyone or by any local authority to try and produce some balance in the economic life of the area. It became completely dependent on coal. We put all our eggs into one basket, and when the industry failed the community began to decay. That is characteristic of this country. There is no planning of industry, no balancing of industry, no attempt to bring a diversity of industries into an area so that if one fails the others will maintain the area. We are now beginning to realise that these areas will never recover if left to themselves. They must be reconstructed; there must be a real effort to renew their lives and that effort must be co-ordinated and assisted by the Government. Private enterprise will not do it by itself; there is no hope of capitalism doing it unless it is directed by the Government of the day. I hope, therefore, that now we have made a beginning. If we speak of this proposal sometimes with contempt we do not do so because we refuse this small measure of assistance but because we know how urgent the problem is, how time is going on, the sands are running down, and how our men and women are decaying. That is why we speak of it as a very small measure. But now that the problem has been approached from the standpoint of public money and the Government themselves are taking a hand, I hope that if these areas are to be reconstructed the mistakes of the past will not be repeated. I hope there will be an attempt to intro-


duce into these areas a diversity of industries which will not make them in the next half century as dependent on one industry as they have been in the past.
May I follow up one point put by the hon. Member for West Middlesbrough (Mr. K. Griffith). As the Resolution stands, every village outside a Special Area as defined will be precluded from getting help. I represent a division in South Wales which is outside a Special Area as defined, but which still contains villages and towns which are as depressed as any in the Special Area. Indeed, in the Special Area there may be towns and villages which are not as depressed as those which are outside the area. I want to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is going to be definite that no application except from what are defined as Special Areas will be considered? May I ask also whether there is going to be any attempt by the Government to determine, even within a Special Area, the location of these industries? Who is to determine this matter Suppose that from South Wales during the first six months there are applications by six companies to establish six new industries and they all want to be established in Cardiff. One of the things which affects us is the trend of industries to the towns. The Chancellor of the Exchequer took some pride that because of tariffs huge great works are being built outside Cardiff at a cost of £3,000,000. They are not new works. They are works transferred from Dowlais to the city of Cardiff. It is not a new works at all. As a matter of fact, the firm has been known as the Dowlais works, only now it will be in the city of Cardiff instead of in Dowlais, a village which is now derelict.
All that we may get in South Wales from this fund is the setting up of new factories and industries in Cardiff and Newport, and perhaps in Swansea, whereas what we want to do is to recover the vitality and life of our valleys and to rebuild our villages. Will the Government try to channel these industries away from the towns, which are continuously growing, while the villages are decaying, away from the towns and cities to the villages and valleys where those industries, however small, may be a very useful contribution?
The hon. Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel) referred to the fact that in certain of the special areas we have what he described as a bad atmosphere. One would not like the statement to go out unchallenged that the people in these special areas are in some way wild or irresponsible and always making trouble. I have been associated all my life, and I am still, as President, with the largest trade union in South Wales, the South Wales Miners Federation. I know that that federation may have a reputation for creating trouble, but I want to deny the assertion that that trouble is always of our snaking. That trouble is far more often of the making of the other people, the coal owners in South Wales. I want the House to remember, while on this subject of industrial strife, that we have had for 10 years an industrial depression in that area, 10 years during which there have been two men for every single job available, 10 years during which the fact that there are two men for every job has been very often ruthlessly used by employers. Do not forget the fact that men who are in work go back to homes where there are one or two or perhaps three who are unemployed, and that the fact that South Wales is a depressed area has spread the feeling not only of depression, but of sourness and bitterness, all over that area. The fact that they are depressed is because there is so much unemployment, and that is why there is so much strife.
I want to speak for my own people, my own country, my own workpeople in South Wales. During the last 10 years a good deal of the strife that has taken place in South Wales has been due to the fact that in that area men have seen what has taken place, that royalty owners have taken out of Soul Is Wales 3d. per ton more on every ton of coal than the average royalty owner has taken in the whole of the country, and they have never seen a single royalty owner making any contribution to relieve the distress in South Wales. During the last 10 or 20 years there has been an enormous amount of gambling by financiers in the coal trade, and all this has created this spirit and is in no small measure responsible for it. I say that the people from whom I sprang, of whom I am proud, are as capable, as hard working, as thrifty, and as good as any other section of people


in this country, and if an appeal is made to them, they will make a response equal to that of any other section of people in this country. I want therefore to make my protest against any conclusion that the ills from which South Wales is suffering now are in any way attributable to those men and women. They are not. They are attributable to causes over which they have no control, and I urge the Chancellor of the Exchequer to give us for this Government, for this rich and prosperous nation, a message to take back to these men and women that this paltry, trivial £1,000,000 is not the last word, but the beginning of words that will not end until these special areas are rebuilt and reconstructed.

10.10 p.m.

Mr. EDE: I recall that when the Labour Government were in office and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood) was Minister of Health, the right hon. Gentleman who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer attacked him because in one of his Housing Bills he had not done sufficient to deal with the garden city idea, and arising very largely from the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, a Departmental Committee was set up by my right hon. Friend, called the Departmental Committee on Garden Cities and Satellite Towns. I had the honour of serving on that committee. We produced a report which I think had a notice of about 10 lines in the "Times," and that apparently was regarded as a sufficient obituary notice to efforts that had lasted over several years.
I want to reinforce the plea that has been so eloquently made by my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelly (Mr. J. Griffiths), that the opportunity thus presented to the Chancellor should be used for securing some real planning of the economic life of these areas. I speak as one who went to County Durham 10 years ago, having never previously seen a mining village or town, and I cannot help thinking that the hon. Baronet the Member for Farnham (Sir A. M. Samuel) has had somewhat the same experience, only he has not gone back again to a mining area to realise the spirit which imbues the people there. My fear about the Chancellor's present proposals is that in limiting the amount of help in any one scheme to £10,000 he is not really giving

these areas the chance of getting the industries which we all feel they should have. When one takes account of the villages mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Spennymoor (Mr. Batey), I think it is going to take far more than £10,000 to get going there the industry that is going to be any real contribution to economic reconstruction.
If you take my own county borough of South Shields, there we are faced with the fact that, as the senior Member for Sunderland (Mr. Furness) said, we are dependent upon two industries, coal and shipbuilding, and both of them are in the plight described by the hon. Member for exactly the same reasons that they are in that plight on the Wear; and if we are to do anything to start alternative industries in these great towns like South Shields and Sunderland, a mere scheme that can be financed for £10,000 is not going very far. I am sure that it will be necessary very largely to have new buildings. I can think of no buildings that there are in those two towns that are likely to attract people who want to start a new industry, nor are they likely to attract workers. I think the House has to realise that unless we make a determined effort in this matter, we shall be faced, as the years follow one another, with an increasing amount of hopelessness in these districts that have suffered so long.
It is not so many months ago that I was in a classroom in Surbiton questioning the children, and one of the boys answered with an accent that betrayed the fact that until a very few weeks before he had lived north of the Tweed. When I commented on it to the assistant teacher in charge of the class, at the end of my visit, he told me that not a single boy in that class had been born in Surbiton, but that all of them had been born outside; and in one of those new estates that one sees springing up round London their parents had come bringing these children, as it were, in flight from these areas where the depression has been so acute. I think it is a very serious thing for this country to be faced with the fact that practically everybody who can move from these districts is doing so, and that people such as accountants, and what are generally called, for some reason I cannot quite understand, the lower middle-class element, if they see a


chance of getting a job near London take it, even if it represents an immediate sacrifice. They do this because they feel that any job they may now have in the distressed areas is one that is not likely to be of very long duration and a job in the south, near London, even if it brings in less money at the moment, probably represents a greater chance of permanent employment than does the job which they hold in a distressed area.
I am quite sure that in order to attract industries to these areas the Government must be prepared to adopt the motto of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer and not be afraid of losing some of this money if they lend it. I am sure that in the great majority of cases they will manage to put their money on the right horse, but if they are going in for experiments they must be prepared to see some of them fail and to believe that possibly the lessons they learn from the failures may be worth the expense incurred. I do urge the Chancellor of the Exchequer—who was not too definite on the matter in his Budget speech—not to be too strict concerning the upper limit of £10,000 when it is clear that the experiment for which the advance is asked is one that really represents a definite effort to start an industry on a large and attractive scale in one of these areas where the industries on which they have depended in the past have apparently gone for good. It would be out of place to-night to deal with the points made in the speech of the hon. Member for Sunderland (Mr. Furness), who pointed to the causes for the distress, but I hope the Chancellor will not be too niggardly in the advances which he makes, and I hope we may feel that this £1,000,000 is not the end of the Government's efforts in this direction.

10.18 p.m.

Sir WALTER SMILES: I have a great deal of sympathy with the moderate speeches made by the hon. Member for Llanelly (Mr. J. Griffiths) and the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede). With a great number of the things they said I am in complete agreement. The hon. Member for South Shields spoke of the movement of people to the South of England, and in that connection I would refer to the position 30 years ago, when

people emigrated from this country to Canada and to Australia, in order to better themselves. Now people stay in this country because it is not possible for them to better themselves abroad.
My only complaint about this grant of £1,000,000 is the narrow geographical boundaries within which the money is to be given. There are a great many areas which, although I do not pretend they have suffered as much as Durham or South Wales, have nevertheless suffered very much. I refer, for instance, to Lancashire. In Durham and in South Wales some of the coal trade has gone, partly I understand because of the operation of sanctions and partly because of the competition of oil, and in Lancashire some of the trade has gone because of the competition of cotton manufacturers in Asia, in India and in Japan. There are a great number of cotton mills in Lancashire which can never work again. They were fine mills some 50 or 60 years ago. They gave a great deal of employment to a large number of workpeople and no doubt made handsome profits for the people who owned them. At the present time they are an eyesore.
The old mills in many of the towns there offer no attraction to people who are likely to establish new industries, and I suggest that part of this sum might be granted, in any way which the Chancellor chose to arrange, to local authorities for the purpose of pulling down those old mills. People who intend to establish new industries are more likely to establish those industries on vacant sites than to take over mills which are perhaps 60 or 70 years old and are not very pleasing or artistic structures. I heard the hon. Member for South Shields recently refer to the wonderful factories which have been set up along the Great West Road. These buildings of reinforced concrete, in the middle of green lawns and illuminated by flood lighting, are a pleasure and a delight to see, and I am sure are pleasant places in which to work. If we had factories of that type in the North, it would help to keep the people there and prevent them coming South in search of work. I think that, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that most of the modern factories are being built in the vicinity of London.
Some hon. Members have sneered at the figure of £1,000,000. but, after all,


it is a large sum and any bank or any creditors of a company if they know that the firm is a live one and that it has £10,000 of additional capital available, will be ready to extend ample credit to it, so long as they know that the order-book is full and that the company is being run on sound lines. Nor do I think that we ought to sneer at firms starting from small beginnings. The plaster-board industry started in a very small way and, as a result of the building boom, it has advanced by leaps and bounds and now employs large numbers. Then there is the tarmac industry, the products of which, I understand, are made from disused slag heaps. It started in a small way and now employs many people. There is also the elastic yarn industry which is starting in Lancashire next month and which, it is hoped, will also give considerable employment. Every new industry is in the nature of an experiment, and a sum of £10,000 may mean the difference between failure and success. The only criticism which I have to offer as regards the £1,000,000—a sum which may be increased later on—is that it is confined to certain areas and is not being extended to other places which are perhaps as much distressed as those areas but are, unfortunately, outside the geographical boundaries which have been fixed.

10.24 p.m.

Mr. CASSELLS: I am pleased to have an opportunity of participating in this Debate. I had the pleasure of witnessing a "talkie" film recently, in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer took the chief part, and his concluding words were "Well, after all, it is not such a bad Budget." He seemed to be speaking with tears in his eyes. Whether they were tears of regret or tears of happiness at having made so successful an escape, I do not know. Although I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman as Chancellor of the Exchequer I can assure him of one thing—that he has great potentialities as a cinema star. With regard to the issues with which we are concerned, the hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell) raised certain important questions with which he asked the right hon. Gentleman to deal. The opening sentence of the Financial Resolution reads:
To authorise the Treasury to make, with a company to be established with the object (among other objects)….

What is the meaning of "among other objects"? If, as we are told, the ostensible purpose of this proposal is to deal with unemployment and distress in the Special Areas, the House is entitled to know precisely the interpretation placed by the Chancellor upon those words. I would invite the attention of the House to the Chancellor's speech on the Budget, in which he said:
On the other hand, it has been argued on good authority that if there is any difficulty about financing small businesses, it is not due to any backwardness on the part of financial interests, but rather to the difficulties that are inherent in the situation. It is said that there would be ample financial backing for any promising industrial enterprise even if it were situated in the most severely depressed area, and that if that financial assistance had not been forthcoming it was not because people were exaggerating the financial risks but because in fact the risk was greater than would be accepted in the ordinary course of business by financial concerns."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st April, 1936; col. 51, Vol. 311.]
If ever there were a definite condemnation from the ranks of the National Government proving conclusively the complete failure of private enterprise, it is in that paragraph. What are these proposals of the Chancellor? The proposals are, as I understand, that business in the Special Areas requires impetus or stimulus, and the argument which is put forward is that the risk is too hazardous and that the Government should accept responsibility to a limited extent. An hon. Lady who spoke earlier used the word "criticism." I never at any time criticise unless with complete justification, and I say that if this is to be the only policy, the only tangible proposal which is to be placed before the House to deal with the distress in the Special Areas, it is completely intolerable. It is shilly-shallying with the position; it is toying with the problem; and again it is proof positive of the bankrupt policy of the National Government when national problems are concerned.
The National Government have been in office for five years, and what have they done to deal with the problem of the distressed areas? They have done practically nothing, so far as I can see. The people of this country are looking to the Government for a lead, and when I think of the conduct of the National Government during their tenure of office, I think of the words of Omar Khayyam. I will


repeat those wards for the benefit of the National Government:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety, nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
We are told that this is a National Government. I ask the Chancellor, What is the meaning of the word "National"? If it means anything, surely it means a Government representative of all sections and every section of the community, working class, middle class and rich alike. I say this Government is not national. It may be national in name, but it is not national in deed. I ask the Chancellor, Are we to go ahead, as we have in the past five years, neglecting the protection of the rights of our citizens? Are we still prepared to permit this nation to go forward, as is admited on all hands, as a C3 nation?

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member is going far outside the terms of this Resolution.

Mr. CASSELLS: I abide by your ruling, Mr. Speaker. I just wish to say that we have a war to wage and that, so far as Members on these benches are concerned, that war is in Great Britain. It is a war against disease, against poverty and against unemployment. With regard to the question of the Special Areas, in the Second Schedule of the 1934 Act the two Special Areas which had first consideration, so far as I can see, are the County of Dumbarton and the County of Larnark. In the County of Dumbarton, which I have the honour to represent, we find that in the past three years the public assistance figures have risen from £35,000 per annum to no less than £72,000. Those figures speak for themselves. In the case of the town of Hamilton, in the county of Lanark, which is represented by the hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. D. Graham), we find these astonishing figures. In December, 1930, the total expenditure in that one month on the ordinary poor was £1,579, and in December, 1935, it had risen to £4,051, an increase of no less than £3,000. As regards the able-bodied poor, for the like periods, the increase was from £622 to £2,400, a total increase per month of no less than £2,000. Taking Scotland as a

whole, and dealing with the mining industry, which in my submission has quite properly been described as a Jekyll and Hyde industry, we find that from 1911 there has been a drop in coal of 25 per cent., in oil shale of 55 per cent., and of all minerals of 28 per cent. We have a definite proposal before us, and I appeal to the Chancellor to reconsider the matter in the light of the facts and circumstances which have been placed before him, and to give to the people justice and no less than justice.

10.34 p.m.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The Debate which we have had upon this Resolution has been characterised by one feature which seems to me to be common to every discussion about the Special Areas. No matter what aspect of the problem the Government may be approaching, no matter what request they are responding to by any new proposal they may bring before this House, with a few honourable exceptions hon. Members opposite receive our proposals with every attempt to belittle, to decry them, and to explain that they are the wrong thing; in short, they do their best to make them inoperative. Hon. Members cannot resist that kind of speech, and they find ground for suspicion and complaint in every phrase of the Resolution. An hon Member opposite inquired what was the sinister meaning of providing that this company should be instituted for a certain purpose, "among other objects."

Mr. CASSELLS: In all fairness I do not think the Chancellor should say that I used the expression "sinister."

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I did not say that the hon. Member used the expression "sinister" but the indication he made by his remark was that there was some sinister purpose behind those words. Perhaps the hon. Member is not aware of the common practice that in the drawing up of a memorandum of association of a company it is necessary not to restrict too closely the purpose for which the company is formed. If you put one object only, you are quite likely to be caught out hereafter and challenged as to whether a particular piece of work which the company may be carrying out is within the terms of the memorandum. It is, therefore, customary to insert words like "among other objects," in order to guard against a possibility of that sort.
The Resolution, though somewhat lengthy, is to cover a Bill which will be introduced, and which will deal only with a comparatively small matter. We have, nevertheless, had a discussion which has ranged over a considerably wider field; which has, in fact, ranged over the whole question of the condition of the Special Areas and of the causes which have brought about that condition. The hon. Member for Pontypool (Mr. Jenkins), in the course of a moderate and reasonable speech, ascribed the condition of the Special Areas entirely to the policy of successive Governments. I do not propose to enter into any detailed argument with him on that point, but I think my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland (Mr. Furness) was very much nearer the heart of this matter when he said, with great knowledge of his subject, that the real cause of the condition of the Special Areas was that in the past they had been associated with only one or two large industries, commonly known as heavy industries, and that when those industries became depressed there was nothing else for the people to turn to. An hon. Member opposite said that in his area it was the coal industry which had brought about the special conditions, and that those conditions had existed for 10 years in the area which he represents. That rather conflicts with the argument the other day that the conditions were brought about entirely by the Tariff, which was introduced only four years ago.
Without entering into further discussions on that question, I would try to answer a question by the hon. Member for Llanelly (Mr. J. Griffiths) as to why industry had not been better planned in that area in the past. In so far as that may be said to be the function of government, that accusation cannot be confined to the Government of one party. It is clear that as long as industry was increasing in the manner in which he described, at the rate of 1,000,000 tons a year, people were much too busy carrying on the industry to think about planning the neighbourhood. It is only when things begin to go wrong, when the industry upon which one of these areas has been dependent begins to fade, that it becomes obvious that it is necessary to turn round and see whether other industries cannot be found to take the place of the work which has begun to decline. I do not think there would

be very much support for a Government which attempted to plan in an area where industry was flourishing in the way that the hon. Member described a little while ago. What we are proposing to do, in the Bill which will be authorised if the Resolution is passed, includes a certain amount of planning. It may be on a small scale, but it is a definite effort to try to make up in some degree, by the establishment of small industries, for the decline of the larger industries upon which these areas in the past have been almost entirely dependent. Let me read to the House a sentence or two from the second report of the Commissioner for the Special Areas. He says:
In my first report reference is made to the difficulty of getting capital for the establishment of new or the expansion of existing industries in the Special Areas. The difficulty relates in the main to the smaller industries, but these are precisely the industries for which, in my view, there is the greatest need in the Special Areas at the present time.
Here we have the Commissioner, who, for a long period has been directing almost the whole of his time and thought to the problems connected with the Special Areas, coming definitely to the conclusion that it is the smaller industries for which there is the greatest need in the Special Areas at the present time. That is not the view of some hon. Members opposite. They have deprecated the idea that we should bring in what the hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell) described as niggling, or piffling, or miserable proposals for the establishment of small industries. He did not make any constructive suggestion himself as to what should be done in those areas, and I could not help thinking that, although his constituents, for whose benefit, no doubt, he made the sort of speech that he did, while they may enjoy very much his terms of abuse of the Government and the proposals of the Government, will perhaps not forget that it would have been still more helpful if he had not attempted to denigrate the proposals of the Government, and so render it more difficult to raise the capital which is necessary to start these small industries, and less possible for the Government's proposals to succeed, but had at least made some proposals of his own.

Mr. SHINWELL: If a suitable opportunity is provided in the House, I shall be only too willing to produce constructive proposals.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I should have thought that this was just the opportunity for the hon. Member—

Mr. SHINWELL: This is your scheme.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I have no doubt that it would have been very easy for the hon. Member, with his fertile mind, to find an opportunity of putting forward the ideas which are teeming in his brain.
Some hon. Members, for example the hon. Member for Spennymoor (Mr. Batey), have said that they do not like experiments. The hon. Member says he is tired of experiments. But has he reflected upon what is the consequence of that proposal? If we are not to try experiments, we must only try certainties. Surely the whole object of the special treatment that we have been endeavouring to apply to the Special Areas is that we should not rely upon certainties. Indeed, we have been urged by many to abandon the idea that we must confine ourselves to certainties and be more enterprising than we are being in this proposition. I suggest to the hon. Member that he is wrong to suggest that we have not to try experiments, that it is just experiments that we have got to try and that the only hope for these areas is that we should not be afraid to try anything which, on the face of it, appears to have even a small chance of turning out successfully because, if we fail in these experiments, no great harm is done. On the other hand, if we can show that a scheme of this kind is sufficiently well-founded to attract capital and will actually establish even a few new industries in these districts we shall have made a start. We shall have more solid ground on which to build further experiments, and that will be the time when we may well consider whether an experiment which has been proved successful in the Special Areas may not subsequently be extended to other areas which are not perhaps as badly off as the Special Areas but which are, nevertheless, very much in need of assistance.

Mr. BATEY: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that while the Government are experimenting the people are starving?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No, I am not aware of that, and it is not true. They

are not starving, though they are suffering hardship and they are suffering from the hopelessness of long waiting without seeing that something satisfactory is coming. The hon. Member might be fair enough to recognise that we have here a problem of extraordinary difficulty. A great deal of patience is required and we ought to try to help one another to find out something which will give us a chance of ameliorating the position and not put difficulties in the way.
The hon. Member for Pontypool asked what the Government were going to do to prevent new industries going to the Midlands instead of to the Special Areas. He was immediately followed by the hon. Member for East Wolverhampton (Mr. Mander), who told us a story of a promising industry that was going to Wolverhampton when the Government stepped in and sent it up to the Special Areas. He said he was not selfish in these matters, but I rather gathered that there was one exception to the general rule, when his own constituency was affected. We are trying a great number of different methods of helping the people in these Special Areas. This one that we are trying now has never pretended to be a universal solution, or even a contribution on a very large scale to the solution of the problem, but it is a definite response to a definite recommendation on the part of the Special Commissioner the terms of which I partly read to the Committee. I might, perhaps, finish the quotation. He said:
If the areas are to share in the general economic revival of the country, they must no longer depend solely on a comparatively few heavy industries.
While this is an experiment which it is well worth while to try, it is not our idea of a complete solution, nor is it the only contribution that we are making to the problem of the Special Areas. Everybody knows that great efforts have been made by the Government to restore or to re-develop some of the heavy industries which were the foundation of the prosperity that once existed in those areas. Much work has been done by the Government, and it has resulted, for instance, in a considerable revival of shipbuilding on the Tyne. The plans for the reopening of the steel works at Ebbw Vale and for the starting of steel works at Jarrow are other cases in point.

Miss WILKINSON: This really is marvelous! I have never had any information from anybody about these steel works at Jarrow. Is the Chancellor taking credit for having started them or are they about to be started?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I have no reason to suppose that the plans which have been made public in the Press are not proceeding in the ordinary course; and though I am not taking any credit for the Government in that respect, I certainly take a great deal of credit for the Special Commissioner appointed by the Government, who has made great efforts to get steel works started at Jarrow. It seems as if nothing can be done in the Special Areas which will please hon. Members opposite.

Miss WILKINSON: You are not doing anything!

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: A number of questions of detail have been asked. I do not propose to answer all of them now, because there will be a much better opportunity of discussing details when the Bill is before the House. But I might perhaps say a word or two on one or two special points which have been put to me. In particular I think a good deal of misunderstanding exists about the way in which this scheme is expected to work. The amount of £1,000,000 has been, of course, the subject of a great deal of scornful comment by hon. Members opposite, who are always tempted to think in terms of tens or hundreds of millions, and who always think that a, question of a million is trifling and not worth thinking about. When you consider that this is a proposal for assisting small industries, purely and specifically small industries and not large industries, and when you consider that according to the plan the £1,000,000 is to be a continuing credit to be used over and over again during the whole life of the company, it will be seen that there is no reason to complain of the smallness of the nominal capital of the company. What is the use of starting a company with a capital of £20,000,000, as the hon. Member for Spennymoor (Mr. Batey) suggested, when you do not even know whether you will be able to get sufficient applications to make use of the £1,000,000?
The hon. Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell) in opening the discussion said he thought it unlikely that even the £1,000,000 would be wanted. If that is so at any rate there will not be quite so much waste of time and money as if we were starting a company with a capital of £20,000,000. But if the company started with £1,000,000 capital proves to be a success there is no reason why its operations should not be extended in the future. The idea of an experiment is that you start in a comparatively small way and expand as you find out the extent to which your experiment can be profitably expanded.
Another question asked me by my hon. Friend the Member for Wallsend (Miss Ward) was as to what I meant when I said that as a general rule the amount of any individual loan would be limited to £10,000. When I referred to that as a general rule I meant to infer that as the industries to be assisted were small I did not expect that in the great majority of cases there was any question that a larger sum than that would be required. I do not wish to exclude the possibility that in exceptional circumstances there might be some case which required a larger sum than £10,000 to enable it to start but which nevertheless it would not be able to obtain through the ordinary sources.
The House will recollect what I said before, that the purpose of this proposed company is not to do the same business as is now being done by ordinary financial institutions, but it is to go beyond that. It is to take risks which the ordinary financial institution would not care to take in the course of ordinary business. That is, in fact, the nature of the experiment. It is possible—I think that it is very likely—that we shall lose a certain amount of money. The hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) begged us not to be afraid of losing money. That is why we are doing the very thing we are proposing to do in this Bill. We are here guaranteeing losses which I personally think may be sustained, and we are guaranteeing those losses in order to see whether, despite those losses, the company can be made a success. But as the company continues to function, the losses will accumulate, but they cannot exceed the total amount of the capital, namely, £1,000,000. Therefore, that is the limita-


tion of the amount of loss which the Exchequer can sustain on the whole process.
The hon. Member for Seaham professed to be unable to understand the financial arrangements of the Bill, although I have my doubts whether his difficulty was quite as great as he made out. It seems fairly clear that the Government are prepared to subscribe £20,000 a year for management expenses, and they are going to subscribe the sum of £100,000 to the reserve fund of the company.

Mr. SHINWELL: I am extremely anxious to ascertain where the initial capital outlay comes from, and whether it will not be necessary for the company to raise a loan through the medium of financial institutions on the guarantee provided by the Treasury.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I stated in my Budget speech that no part of the capital would be found by the State, and therefore, the hon. Member is quite correct in supposing that the capital is to be raised from private sources.

Mr. SHINWELL: Then, will the right hon. Gentleman deal with my main point, which is, where is the £1,000,000 coming from? Is it to come as a direct contribution from the State to be placed at the disposal of the company, or is the £1,000,000 as such to be raised through the medium of the financial institutions on the guarantee of the Government, and the guarantee itself, and any losses sustained to be eventually met on the winding up of the company? That is in the Resolution.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The hon. Member is repeating his question. He asks, is the £1,000,000 capital of the company to be provided by the State. I said in my Budget speech that no part of the capital is to be provided by the State, and I say, therefore, that the £1,000,000 is to be raised from private sources. It is not to be raised on the guarantee of the Government. It will be raised—I hope that it will be raised, if people are not too frightened by the gloomy prophecies of the hon. Member—I should think, probably largely from public-spirited motives. I cannot imagine any very great attraction about this scheme, but it is raised on the consideration that the Government are guaranteeing the losses up to 25 per cent, of the loans granted.

Mr. SHINWELL: May I put my last question to the right hon. Gentleman now that he has, in point of fact, substantiated my contention. Will he now agree that the total amount of capital which at any time during the operation of his scheme can be met out of Treasury funds will be £250,000?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No, it is not. The Treasury guarantees losses up to 25 per cent. of the amount of the loans granted. The capital will be used as a revolving credit again and again, and losses may take place, until in the end the whole of the million pounds originally subscribed may have been lost. In that case the Government will have to foot the bill up to the amount of that loss. The Government are going shares, as it were, in the possible losses of this company in order to induce private enterprise to find the rest of the money. The profits of the company are to be strictly limited. The rate of interest will not be prescribed, but it will be considering the nature of the company, as near as possible, but not quite the same, as the rate charged if a bank were to lend.
The hon. Member for Llanelly asked me a question about the allocation of the industries in the Special Areas. He said that it might well be that it would be much easier to plant the industries in the large towns than in the villages, whereas the need for employment would probably be greater in the villages than in the towns. That is not a matter on which one can lay down strict conditions. It is better to have a new industry started in a town than not at all, although I agree with the hon. Member that we would prefer to see them in the villages. My answer is contained in what I said in my Budget speech, that the company will work in the closest co-operation with the local authorities, the development councils and other local bodies that are willing to co-operate, give advice and exercise influence in the locating of the particular industries. We cannot force industries to go where they do not want to go, but in so far as we can employ local knowledge and local influence to induce them to go where we want them to go, that influence will be used. In conclusion, I commend the Resolution to the House as a preliminary step in a measure which does not pretend to deal


with the problem as a whole, but which, I hope, will be a useful contribution towards a solution of the problem.

Mr. BEVAN: On a point of Order. The right hon. Gentleman twitted my hon. Friend the Member for Seaham (Mr. Shinwell) on not having put forward alternative suggestions. As many of my hon. Friends have alternative suggestions to make, I should like to ask whether it would be in order to advance alternative suggestions on the Resolution now before the House.

Mr. SPEAKER: I should like to hear the suggestions before I give any Ruling.

Mr. BEVAN: I cannot hope that any suggestion that I can put forward will meet with the approval of hon. Members opposite, but we have a number of preliminary suggestions we can make, which have been made in various ways in the House before but the Chancellor of the Exchequer has taken no notice of them. Before I mention one or two I should like to point out that the reference made by the right hon. Gentleman to the restarting of the works at Ebbw Vale may easily be misunderstood. I naturally am exceedingly pleased that the steel works are being restarted and the pleasure will be shared by everybody in every part of the House. It is a very large steel works and once it is under way it ought to have a great influence in lifting the atmosphere of that district. I should like to point out to the right hon. Gentleman that I can provide him with the literature of the Conservative candidate and his supporters at the last Election, in which the managing director of the steel works denies any Government participation whatsoever in the resumption of the works. A pretty quarrel is going on between the managing director and the Special Commissioner in which the managing director denies that the Special Commissioner has had anything to do with the restarting of the works.
I am the last person to try and take from the Special Commissioner any credit for the Herculean efforts he has made in spite of great difficulties to establish industries in the depressed areas. We suggest that light industries should be established in depressed areas in substitution of the heavy industries which have been declining for over 10 years. They have left a volume of unemployment and the only way to provide employment

for these men is to establish light industries in substitution of the heavy industries which have been stopped. We have been putting forward this suggestion for the last 10 years—[An HON. MEMBER: "Even when you were in office"] —but our pleas have not been listened to very sympathetically. In considering this problem it is necessary to answer the question why light industries establish themselves outside depressed areas, and are reluctant to go into them. Obviously it is because there is a greater consuming power outside than there is inside the distressed areas. If light industries are to be maintained inside distressed areas it can only be done by building up the purchasing power of the people in the areas.
The reason why light industries are establishing themselves around London is obviously because London provides a market for the products of those industries. If light industries are to be maintained in the distressed areas you must build up a market for their products there. The reason why there are depressed areas is because of the large number of unemployed, and therefore they have a very low purchasing power. If you are sincere in your intention to try and establish, and also maintain, light industries in depressed areas, you ought not to depress the purchasing power of the unemployed population in those areas by submitting them to disadvantages which the rest of the country does not share.
The right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer is taking away from South Wales, from Durham, and from Lanarkshire millions of pounds every year by the imposition of the means test. I do not ask that you should give more to the men who are unemployed in the distressed areas than you give to men outside, but at least give them as much. We have not got the figures before us, because they are concealed in the Chancellor's own accounts, but some time ago we had a figure put in this House that as much as £15,000,000 to £16,000,000 a year are being saved to the national finances out of the means test, or £50,000,000 since the imposition of the means test in 1931. This is the purchasing power that you need to consume the products of the light industries. Is it not therefore a concrete suggestion of value, although it may be disagreeable, although


it may be indigestible to hon. Members opposite, that you should leave that £15,000,000 in the distressed areas?
A week or two ago the House considered another proposition. There was a surplus of £6,000,000 in the Unemployment Insurance Fund, and in order to make a present of £2,000,000 to the workers and contributors to insurance, this House dissipated £4,500,000 that might easily have been used to increase the rates of benefit in the distressed areas. If unemployment figures fall, as it is expected that they will fall in the next six months of the year—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear"]—Yes, it, is true, because large numbers of unemployed men are being engaged in building floating tombstones on the Atlantic. At any rate, the facts are that the unemployment figures will fall, and there will be a further surplus on that fund. Is that going to be disssipated in the same way? Where the distressed areas are in Great Britain is where the exporting coal districts are. Is that denied by the Chancellor? Is there any hon. Member here who denies that? A little while ago the miners attempted to get an increased wage, and a very large portion of the increased wage that they obtained is passed back to the Chancellor by the deduction of unemployment allowances. These are the wages that would have to be used to buy the products of the light industries.
This House also passed a Resolution on a free vote saying that the miners' demand for an increased wage ought to be conceded. In South Wales they got an average of 3½d. per day. The largest increase has been given in those portions of the coal trade where distress does not exist in the same degree. For many years now students of the coal industry —and again I emphasise that it is the decline of the coal industry that is mainly responsible for the distress, and the decline is most marked in those districts employing the export market—have implored the Government to reorganise the coal trade so as to enable those exporting districts to sustain the burden of exports by using some of the revenue of the home market. Instead of that, South Wales, Durham, Northumberland and some parts of Scotland have had to sustain the whole burden of meeting the export trade of Great Britain.

Is it not, therefore, a concrete suggestion of first-class importance to say that if the purchasing power of the export trades, and the distressed areas in which they exist, is to be increased, the coal industry must be unified so that the burden of sustaining the export trade falls on industry as a whole? But that requires a wide and comprehensive policy and not the pettifogging and niggling approach which the Government are making.
It is no use the Chancellor of the Exchequer saying that we decry every effort he is making. I welcome every experiment that can be made with a view to preventing the drift of industry and population from the distressed areas, but I submit to the Chancellor and the House in all seriousness that a wider and more comprehensive view than that which the Government have is necessary if the problem is to be properly tackled. The carrying out of all the suggestions I have made is within the powers of the Government and this House, and I maintain that the Chancellor is not being fair to the House or to the Opposition, which have implored him over and over again to tackle the problem on the lines I have suggested. He exposes himself quite legitimately to the charge of bringing to bear on this problem a pettifogging intelligence, unless he reorganises the heavy industries which exist in the distressed areas, and unless he sends funds into those areas in order to build up their purchasing power, and thereby provide a market for the light industries. This £1,000,000 will not be spent, and it will not be spent because private enterprise, as the Chancellor has already said in his Budget statement, will not invest money philanthropically in those areas. The Chancellor himself will have to foster the proper economic conditions in those areas if the light industries are to survive. If the Chancellor wants other concrete suggestions, our minds are teeming with them, if he would afford us an opportunity of bringing them before him.
Question, "That this House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution," put, and agreed to.
Bill ordered to be brought in upon the said Resolution by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Godfrey Collins, Mr. Ernest Brown and Mr. W. S. Morrison.

SPECIAL AREAS RECONSTRUCTION (AGREEMENT) BILL,

"to authorise the Treasury to make an agreement with a company to be incorporated by the name of the Special Areas Reconstruction Association, Limited, and to make payments to the company in accordance with that agreement; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid," presented accordingly, and read the First time; to be read a Second time upon Monday next, and to be printed. [Bill 92.]

BUCKINGHAM'S CHARITY INDUNSTABLE BILL.

Considered in Committee, and reported, without Amendment; to be read the Third time To-morrow.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

ADJOURNMENT.

Resolved, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Captain Margesson.]

Adjourned accordingly at Twenty-two Minutes after Eleven o'Clock.